How easy is it to have a conversation with a chatbot and not realize it?
During a stint of internet dating I once had a conversation with a pretty girl who I assumed was a bot because she was, as near as I could tell, unable to comprehend sentences.
I tested this hypothesis by making my sentences more and more nonsensical (using imaginary words and the like) to see if she would
a) say “wtf are you on?” or
b) ask for my phone number (jump the shark — bot!).
She asked for my phone number.
I said: “No thanks, for [these reasons] I think you’re probably a bot trying to harvest my personal information.”
… later, for various and sundry reasons, I figured out that she was real.
An actual, honest-to-God human.
… she just failed the Turing test.
A Turing Test is a method of inquiry in artificial intelligence (AI) for determining whether or not a computer is capable of thinking like a human being. The test is named after Alan Turing, the founder of the Turing Test and an English computer scientist, cryptanalyst, mathematician and theoretical biologist.
So probably it’s pretty easy for computers to pass the Turing test, but not because the bots are so good at pretending to be human.
