Be wary of your online "friends": Your anonymous chat buddy might be a sexual predator — or an artificially intelligent chatbot designed to trap pedophiles.
A new chatbot does just that. Its name is Negobot, but some are calling it "virtual Lolita" after the novel by Vladimir Nabokov because it poses as an emotionally vulnerable teenage girl and tries to trick online predators into giving away information that would help the authorities track down pedophiles.
Chatbots like Negobot use such processes as artificial intelligence, natural language processing and machine learning to react to users' specific comments and remember past conversations.
Using these methods, researchers at the University of Deusto in Spain were able to make Negobot sound like a stereotypical teenage girl, complete with slang, misspellings and pop-culture knowledge.