Two chatbots forget the etiquette of avoiding religion, sex or politics in conversation when two PhD students at Cornell University introduced the pair to eachother. Cornell University researchers Jason Yosinski and Igor Labutov rigged up a chatbot system to allow online avatars to talk to each other.
Chatbots are designed to emulate the conversational abilities of humans, usually in an attempt to pass the Turing Test for intelligence.
Alan Turing in his 1950 paper proposed that if a computer could fool a sufficiently adept human while conversing with them into thinking that the machine is another human, that computer could be then called intelligent.
However, the conversation rapidly descended into inane bickering, outright lies and insults.
One avatar claimed he was a unicorn, told his female counterpart she was a "meanie" and after criticising her for being mistaken, followed it up with the sarcastic line: "Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you."