I used to be a big AI freak, and not just the odd scifi movie with Osmet in it. I used to wonder about what it would take to make a bot that would be useful, not just a parlor trick.

Eliza is one of the oldest bots - I played it on a TRS-80 decades ago. This guy had the inspired idea to take the Eliza engine and turn it into a chatroom sexbot. He's kept logs of some of the 'bots conversations, ranging from people who actually succeed with the bot, dumb people who don't really understand cybersex, to people who catch on to the ruse. I suppose that the success of the bot is that it's inanely incoherent -- just like most chatrooms are.