It will even check up on you every now and then to see how you are doing. On a scale where zero is human and five is machine, mine scored 0.2, putting on a sentient level with but – disturbingly – slightly more robotic than (pictured)ĭesigned to help those suffering from depression by facilitating quick conversations.

You can feed it your own – or anyone else’s – Twitter name and quickly establish how bot-like your bon mots are. Now called the Botometer (after the original was targeted by copycat hacks), it boasts a sophisticated algorithm based on all it has learned. In its infancy the bot-detector “BotOrNot?” allowed you to use many of the conventional indicators of automation – abnormal account activity, repetition, generic profiles – to determine the origin of a Twitter feed. The most accessible automated Turing test is the creation of Professor Emilio Ferrara, principal investigator in machine intelligence and data science at the University of Southern California. Naturally, because of the scale of the task, they must enlist bots to help them find bots. That confidence does not extend, however, to those who have devoted the last decade or so to trying to detect, and defend against, that bot invasion. For the moment, most of us remain serenely confident that we can tell the difference between a human presence and the voices of the encoded “foot soldiers” of the internet that perform more than 50% of its tasks and contribute about 20% of all social media “conversation”. The ability of bots – a term which can describe any automated process present in a computer network – to mimic human online behaviour and language has developed sharply in the past three years. I’ve resisted the domestic spies of Apple and Amazon, but one or two friends jokingly describe the rapport they and their kids have built up with Amazon’s Alexa or Google’s Home Hub – and they are right about that: the more you tell your virtual valet, the more you disclose of wants and desires, the more speedily it can learn and commit to memory those last few fragments of your inner life you had kept to yourself.Īs the line between human and digital voices blurs, our suspicions are raised: who exactly are we talking to? No online conversation or message-board spat is complete without its doubters: “Are you a bot?” Or, the contemporary door-slam: “Bot: blocked!” Those doubts will only increase.

We find ourselves locked into interminable text chats with breezy automated bank tellers and offer our mother’s maiden name to a variety of robotic speakers that sound plausibly alive. We are surrounded by machine voices, and think nothing of conversing with them – though each time I hear my car tell me where to turn left I am reminded of my grandmother, who having installed a telephone late in life used to routinely say goodnight to the speaking clock. A lan Turing’s famous test of whether machines could fool us into believing they were human – “the imitation game” – has become a mundane, daily question for all of us.

Storyboard quick.