(Photo: Cleverbot)

Look out, Hollywood screenwriters: the robots are coming for your jobs, too.

Cleverbot is an artificial intelligence robot that Internet users can converse with and, more frequently, troll until it says funny stuff. But one filmmaker, Chris Wilson, saw the creative potential in Cleverbot and decided to co-write a short film with it. It might just be the first movie written by a machine.

Mr. Wilson chatted back and forth with Cleverbot in order to tease out the dialogue for the script. Some of the character names also came from Cleverbot--the lead is called "Stomach," for instance, 'cuz Cleverbot is sassy like that. The title of the short, "Do You Love Me?", also came from the surprisingly emo mind of Cleverbot.

As smart as Cleverbot is, though, it's gleefully unaware that it co-wrote a movie. "Your movie is great!" we told it. "Get your hand off my mouth?" it responded. Okay then.

(h/t Laughing Squid)

The researchers are attempting to train personal assistant robots to learn and adapt when presented with new problems, rather than repeating tasks they've been programmed to do and repeated many times. The robots had a 98 percent success rate "when dealing with objects and environments they had seen before" ... and a 95 percent success rate "when dealing with new objects in new environments."

But just when Betabeat was started to get creeped out about the rise of the machines, we watched the video of a robot at Cornell. They still seem really stupid! This bit of machine learning is "very cutting edge," a Cornell representative told Betabeat by email, and the robots don't require human bodies as fuel. Our reaction? Phew. Mankind still reigns.

A Cornell