It's not crap, it's just a continuum. There are already chatbots that 'pass' sufficiently well to keep lonely people sending them salacious text messages. And presumably when the day comes that the robots are marching on Washington DC to argue for their rights, pretty much everyone will be convinced. For every step in between there will be 'AI's that fool more of the people, more of the time.
Hold on, you may say, we're talking about chatbots progressively fooling people, not 'real' artificial intelligence. But with better chatting comes better functional intelligence. For my bank's chatbot to converse sufficiently well to provide useful customer service requires it to understand all sorts of language and questions. For a personal avatar to take all your messages or make you fall in love with it (like that recent movie) requires even more capability. Whether it can ever transition into fully sapient consciousness verges on philosophy or, at any rate, is a question we can't answer yet.
The only aspect where this chatbot seems better than ELIZA is that it can query the internet for state capitals. That's 50 years of a complete lack of advancement.
Hold on, you may say, we're talking about chatbots progressively fooling people, not 'real' artificial intelligence. But with better chatting comes better functional intelligence. For my bank's chatbot to converse sufficiently well to provide useful customer service requires it to understand all sorts of language and questions. For a personal avatar to take all your messages or make you fall in love with it (like that recent movie) requires even more capability. Whether it can ever transition into fully sapient consciousness verges on philosophy or, at any rate, is a question we can't answer yet.