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.

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