Historically, when it came to deciding whether we were interacting with a human or a computer, we had the Turing Test. Created in 1949 by Alan Turing himself, there was once even a prize for whoever could create an artificial conversational entity (ACE) capable of successfully duping enough of the judges into believing that they were chatting with a real person.
As fate would have it, interest in the Turing Test ebbed, the prize became defunct, and feverish reports on Star Trek-style computers that could interact with us just like humans dwindled.
Seventy-five years later, however, the problem migrated off the pages of far-fetched sci-fi novels and it has now flooded across most, if not all social media platforms. Facebook, Instagram, X, Reddit, TikTok, and even – or perhaps especially – LinkedIn are now drowning under AI-generated content from accounts posing as humans, turning what used to be an after-dinner academic conversation piece into an irritating continual Bot or Not? sanity check.
But one thing has evolved: instead of the Turing Test, we now have… Continue reading →