Facebook has launched a new chatbot that claims to be able to demonstrate empathy, knowledge and personality.
"Blender" was trained using available public domain conversations that included 1.5 billion examples of human exchanges.
The social media giant said that 49% of people prefer interactions with the chatbot, compared to another human being.
But experts say that training artificial intelligence (AI) using a platform like Reddit has its drawbacks.
Numerous problems have arisen during longer conversations. Sometimes Blender replied in offensive language and other times he invented the facts entirely.
The researchers said they hoped further models could address some of these problems.
"We believe that the release of models is essential to enable comprehensive and reliable insights into their capabilities," said a Facebook spokesman.
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Artificial Intelligence expert Dave Coplin, chief executive officer of The Envisioners consultancy, said Blender was a "step in the right direction", but noted two key issues that still need to be overcome.
"The first is how complex it is to replicate all the nuances of a human attribute, such as the ability to hold a conversation, a skill that most three-year-olds can master," he told the BBC.
"The second concerns the relationship with the data used to form the model and the results generated by the model.
"As fantastic a platform as Reddit as it is, training the conversation-based algorithms you find will get you doing a lot of straw among the wheat."
Facebook also compared Blender's performance to the latest version of Google's chatbot, Meena.
He showed people two sets of conversations, one with Blender and the other with Meena.
The conversations included a wide range of topics including film, music and veganism.
Facebook said 67% of respondents think Blender has a more human sound than Meena.
"We achieved this through a new chatbot recipe that includes improved decoding techniques, new skill fusion and a 9.4 billion parameter model, which is 3.6 times more than the largest system in existence.
"This is the first chatbot to merge a diverse set of conversation skills into a single system."
"Building a truly intelligent dialogue agent capable of chatting like a human being remains one of the biggest open challenges in artificial intelligence today."
