You’ll have heard of the Turing Test, which Alan Turing proposed in 1950 as a way of judging whether an AI is capable of intelligent behaviour. The quest to pass it has resulted in many chatbots designed to trick people into thinking they’re human. The first famous one was Eliza in 1965, and today there’s an annual tournament called the Loebner Prize. There still hasn’t been consensus on whether it’s been passed, despite various claims, such as one in 2014 for a bot called Eugene, which passes itself off as a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy.
Actually, though, the Turing Test was passed long ago, in May 1989. Accidentally. The bot was called mGonz, and it was made by a 20-year-old University College Dublin undergraduate called Mark Humphrys. He’d left it on a server to take chat messages sent to him when he was away. And one day, someone from Drake University, Iowa, happened to come across it, ‘fingering’ the server and finding it responded with the line, “Cut this cryptic shit speak in full sentences”. What ensued was a one-and-a-half hour slinging match between this unnamed Iowan and the bot.
mGonz’s secret was that it was programmed to be a jerk. “Mark?” asks the human. “Mark isnt here and hes left me to deal with cretins like you,” replies mGonz. The conversation soon turns to sex, with mGonz repeatedly asking the human when he last got laid, leading him to claim it was the previous night, and that, “i have been laid about 65 times since january 1st 1989,” but he’s eventually worn down and admits it was over 24 hours before. Bot wins.
mGonz might not have been sophisticated, but it did demonstrate one thing rather well: men are putty when their sexual activity is questioned.