The Other Turing Test?

from the not-what-you-think dept

Many people are familiar with the phrase "Turing Test," but have very different ideas on what it means. It's not quite the contest that's run every year which is supposed to be a "Turing Test." Even less known, however, is the fact that Turing had more than one test outlined concerning computers fooling humans into believing they were human. Clive Thompson writes about some students who recently ran a different type of Turing test, where users were told they were talking with a male pretending to be female or a female -- and had to guess which was which. What they weren't told, was that there were also some chatbots pretending to be females included in the mix. In such cases, obviously, it's different than what people traditionally think of as a "Turing Test" since the participants don't even know that talking to a chatbot is a possibility. However, it does sound like some of the participants figured out that something was up when the answers seemed quite strange. However, in many cases, apparently, the chatbots answers were no stranger than the men pretending to be women.
Hide this

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team


Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


  1. identicon
    dorpus, 11 Jul 2005 @ 8:16am

    Yeah What About Homos Man

    How many of them are running around pretending to be Japanese women? I've exposed a few, when nobody else on the forum guessed it. How many laid-off engineers with English teaching jobs are getting injected with AIDS up their ass right now?

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 11 Jul 2005 @ 9:43am

    Re: Yeah What About Homos Man

    Mi-Sung? Is that you?

    link to this | view in thread ]


Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.