What does it mean to be human? What defines our humanity? Writer Clive Thompson pondered these questions one night recently as he was being solicited by an online chatbot over AIM trying to get him to go to her sexy webcam site.

He responded to her prescripted come on lines with musings on the nature of artificial intelligences and a brief exposition of how the famous Turing test, was not, as most people believe, designed to prove whether an entity was a human or a computer, but to see if a computer could convince you it was a female, which is exactly what these chatbots are doing. And apparently we are humans are failing the Turing test because otherwise they wouldn’t keep trying to get your credit card number.

Which means perhaps the greatest advances in natural language and semantic simulations are not occurring in academic laboratories, but over AOL Instant Messenger via zombie bot networks for online sexy video promotion and probable credit card fraud. Once again, porn paves the future of the internet.

“Let’s get this party started!” My evening talking to “babygurl01475” … [Collision Detection via BoingBoing]

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