This week, Google released a research paper chronicling one of its latest forays into artificial intelligence. Researchers at the company programmed an advanced type of “chatbot” that learns how to respond in conversations based on examples from a training set of dialogue. And the bot doesn’t just answer by spitting out canned answers in response to certain words; it can form new answers from new questions. This means Google's researchers could get a little creative with it, and they certainly did — they asked the bot everything from boring IT questions to inquiries about the meaning of life. The responses...