In 2014, a chatbot passed the Turing Test by pretending to be a clumsy 13-year-old boy. A decade later, teenagers are dating them…should we be worried?
On June 7, 2014, exactly 60 years after the death of codebreaker Alan Turing, a chatbot named Eugene Goostman convinced a third of the judges at London’s Royal Society that it was a living, breathing human. The trick? Eugene wasn’t smart. He wasn’t charming. He was a “13-year-old boy” from Odessa, Ukraine, who spoke English as a second language. That meant every typo, every dodged question, and every bizarre non sequitur got waved away with the same excuse: he’s just a kid. Critics called it cheating. We call it a premonition. Eugene didn’t prove that machines could imitate us. He proved that we’re willing to make allowances for a machine, as long as we have an emotional reason to.