How I failed the Turing Test

[Jeff]

Jason Striegel is a real person. No, he's not a celebrity, and despite what you might think, he's not a bot, though he's been mistaken for both in the land of AOL Instant Messenger.

In his blog, Striegel writes how back in March he started getting random instant messages from strangers who thought he was a celebrity. Apparently, his screen name somehow made it on to a list of celebrity screen names (he is not one). At first, he'd explain the error, only to get summarily dumped. The fun began when he started to play along.

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: ****, 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.

Celebritydom was fun for Striegel, but things got really weird when he wound up on a list of bots.

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.

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:

jmstriegel: no, really. I'm quite human.
jmstriegel: test me if you want
shymuffin32: ok
shymuffin32: why do you like music?
jmstriegel: hmm. i've never really considered that.
jmstriegel: hell, i'm not going to be able to contrive a good answer for that one. ask me something else.
shymuffin32: jeesus, you're worse than eliza

And there you have it. I've been intellectually humbled by a 1960s robotic psychologist.

Being a bot could be fun, too, but to get slammed as a lousy bot is really sad. Read Striegel's complete blog entry for the full details.

Have you been mistaken for a celebrity or a bot? What's your funniest IM story?