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How I Failed the Turing Test
chrisjrn writes "I stubled across this article today, detailing a man's experiences of being added to AIM Screen Name lists - one full of "celebrities" and the other full of "Sex Bots" (he was, of course, neither of these).
Raises a few questions as to how easy it is to get a hold of your screenname, and also of the effectiveness of the Turing Test for AI, in the online world. Or is it just that people aren't bothered trying to tell the humans apart anymore?" Also, it's funny. Don't try to read anything deep into it.
... from those buddies on your list. I really fail to see exactly what the "security" risk is here - if you're hypersensitive about the people messaging you, then you can choose to be hypersensitive, lose some functionality and turn off the "randomness" factor. Most people exchange IM names through some other means of communications, either verbally or written, so this loss of functionality can be sidestepped while maintaining your online secrecy.
Hagrin.com
Makes me think of Azimov short stories.
I like the conclusion.
How I failed the Turing test
Posted Sep 4 2005 - 1:26pm by Jason Striegel
Filed under ai | celebrities | computer science | psychology | technology
Some time around March, I started receiving a number of random instant messages from people I've never met before. Apparantly, my AIM alias had been added to at least two online lists and people all over the world were busy importing me as a buddy.
I say "at least two" because the people who contacted me fell into one of two camps: people who thought they were contacting a celebrity and people who thought they were contacting a robot. As I talked to more and more of these folks, I began to discover something really disturbing about myself:
I consistently fail to be perceived as human.
When this first started happening, a typical conversation with a celebrity admirer would go something like this (participant's IM handle is fabricated):
angelcutie42: hi!
jmstriegel: hey. what's up? do i know you?
angelcutie42: no
angelcutie42: someone gave me a bunch of screen names. i heard you are a celebrity.
jmstriegel: that's weird. i'm afraid i'm not a celeb at all.
angelcutie42: oh.
angelcutie42: bye
This was entertaining at first, but it quickly became a bit depressing as the angelcutie42s of the wired world would, one after the other, decide I wasn't worth talking to if I wasn't a celebrity. Want to know what it's like being dumped by a random groupie 5 times a day? Not good at all, thank you very much.
So that's when I started hamming it up a bit. I'm not really proud of it, but my fans wanted a celebrity.. so I gave them one:
sexybumkin123: hey.. so you're famous right?
jmstriegel: Who me? I'm a movie star.
jmstriegel: Shit, I gotta go.
jmstriegel: My limo just arrived and Paris wants her damned sidekick back.
sexybumkin123: Oh my god. Come back!
sexybumkin123: I love you!!!!
My groupies loved it. The more celebrity balogna I manufactured, the more they ate it, and the more they loved me.
Then, something strange started happening. As my career as an artificial celebrity started to take off, I began to receive some strange IMs from a whole new class of random people. These new admirers were convinced I was a robot... and it suddenly became clear to me that something was very wrong.
Nobody would believe I was human. In one troubling conversation after another, I felt my intellectual teeter-totter quickly tip from from actual to artificial.
fratburger86: hey. so you're a sex bot?
jmstriegel: umm, no. who the hell are you?
fratburger86: yeah you are! i found your im online
jmstriegel: that's fine and all, but i'm pretty sure you have me confused with someone else.
fratburger86: just a normal chat bot then?
jmstriegel: nope. i'm human
fratburger86: ok. sure.
fratburger86: asl?
jmstriegel: no thanks.
fratburger86: what?
jmstriegel: i'm not really interested in any conversation that starts with "asl"
fratburger86: oh come on. say something sexy.
jmstriegel: seriously, i think you want to talk to someone else.
fratburger86: i knew it!!!
fratburger86: you are totally a robot!
This is where things took a turn for the worse.
Does this count?
Some time around March, I started receiving a number of random instant messages from people I've never met before. Apparantly, my AIM alias had been added to at least two online lists and people all over the world were busy importing me as a buddy.
I say "at least two" because the people who contacted me fell into one of two camps: people who thought they were contacting a celebrity and people who thought they were contacting a robot. As I talked to more and more of these folks, I began to discover something really disturbing about myself:
I consistently fail to be perceived as human.
When this first started happening, a typical conversation with a celebrity admirer would go something like this (participant's IM handle is fabricated):
This was entertaining at first, but it quickly became a bit depressing as the angelcutie42s of the wired world would, one after the other, decide I wasn't worth talking to if I wasn't a celebrity. Want to know what it's like being dumped by a random groupie 5 times a day? Not good at all, thank you very much.
So that's when I started hamming it up a bit. I'm not really proud of it, but my fans wanted a celebrity.. so I gave them one:
My groupies loved it. The more celebrity balogna I manufactured, the more they ate it, and the more they loved me.
Then, something strange started happening. As my career as an artificial celebrity started to take off, I began to receive some strange IMs from a whole new class of random people. These new admirers were convinced I was a robot... and it suddenly became clear to me that something was very wrong.
Nobody would believe I was human. In one troubling conversation after another, I felt my intellectual teeter-totter quickly tip from from actual to artificial.
This is where things took a turn for the worse.
I mentioned already that I couldn't convince a single person that I wasn't a chat bot. It's one thing for people to think you are artificially intelligent. I can live with that, I guess. What really killed me was that the more I tried proving my "actual" intelligence, the more my "artificial" intelligence would get called into question. Take this pivotal conversation:
Dvorak on Doomtech
Georg
Lenny Foner wrote a great article about this sort of thing back in 1993. I still recommend it.
For a classic example, anybody using Emacs has AI to thank for that. Lisp originated as part of an IBM project arising out of one of Minsky's ideas and was finalized as part of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Project (again, Minsky was involved in that).
Like the space program, AI is full of many many spinoffs and useful "failed" experiments. The umbrella term AI covers quite a few useful theories and concepts, most of which have non-humanlike applications.
(I figure *you* know this, squarooticus, just tossing this out to those who don't).
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
This isn't new. The name for this phenomina is a "reverse Turing test". See the Wikipedia entry on Revese Turing test.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Did you note that you don't need to give an EXACT answer to qualify as human? Saying just "Because it's background noise? Well, no, because other background noises (e.g., a lawnmower or some co-workers' chatter) annoy me. What then? I have no clue" would have allowed you to pass the Turing Test. So the question was just fine, and the original answer was bot-likely stupid.
BTW, using images would put it out of the scope of the original form of the Test.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Hey, you replied! your answer to the question 'why do you like music' is
"Well, try to answer that yourself. Why do you like music? What would you answer there?
Because I sure as heck can't think of any good answer there, generic or not. Screw trying to anwer that bla bla bla"
I've heard that prank way too many times on the Howard Stern show. They call it "Chinese Confusion."
mbbac
Ah, that brings back memories of something from a year ago ... Eliza vs. Pizza Hut.
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