BBC News: “Facebook has launched a new chatbot that it claims is able to demonstrate empathy, knowledge and personality. “Blender” was trained using available public domain conversations which included 1.5 billion examples of human exchanges. The social media giant said 49% of people preferred interactions with the chatbot, compared with another human. But experts say training the artificial intelligence (AI) using a platform such as Reddit has its drawbacks. Numerous issues arose during longer conversations. Blender would sometimes respond with offensive language, and at other times it would make up facts altogether. Researchers said they hoped further models would address some of these issues…”