Saturday, 30 August 2025

Not A Pooping Robot

Not that i am regular reader of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology but they had a great piece about Ai where it did an experiment in some sort of reverse Turing Test to discover which Words would convince other Humans that you are not a Robot.
In the first round they discovered that the the 1,089 study participants narrowed it down to10 categories with words associated to emotions, foods and bodily functions which makes sense as robots are emotionless machines, don't eat and struggle with bodily functions due to having no body.   
These were then narrowed down further to those top two words from each of the categories most likely to convince other humans of your humanity and asked a new group of 2,405 participants to say which one of the words, if uttered, would most make you think the respondent was human, and the top choice was 'Poop'.
This could, the researchers said, be because the word has the highest average relative strength, referring to bodily function and evoking an emotional response which satisfies the human mind that this must be another human.
All very educational and good to know if you ever find yourself in a scenario where you are trying to convince someone you are the real human and the other is a robot, just shout 'Poop' and the robot will be the one Shut Down or so you would think because the Scientists had a brilliant twist at the end of the piece.
'The Study does provide some fascinating insight into our self-perception and what we feel it means to be human' they said, 'although now that this information is on the internet where any old AI with WiFi could get access to it, the study may not now really help us tell person from machine'.
Brilliant, so they found a safe word for us to prove that we are not Robots and then told the Robots it so they can now make us believe they are human and not Robots therefore defeating the purpose of the whole study.
Poop indeed.

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