Failing the Turing test.

I’ve been slowly working my way up in twitter followers and other aspects of social media. The day job injected itself, once again, with one of the last “followers.” She or perhaps better “it” was a robot. The English was a tiny bit stilted, and the cover image recognizable from a stock photo, but that wasn’t the give away. It was posting a circular list of quotations, one or two with characteristic grammar errors. Every ten to fifteen posts was a different one with a link to something. Usually diet pills or some such insalubrious product. If you didn’t go through the machine’s list of tweets you’d miss that. So it almost passed the Turing test. Clever idea though. Create a lot of small, human-looking accounts. Set up some sort of reasonable-looking feed and then put in the occasional spam. Since there are many of the accounts, even if twitter catches a few, the message will still get out. Just glad it wasn’t porn.

Author: Amelia

A mild-mannered professor of computer science in real-life, I remove my glasses in the evening to become, well, a mild-mannered author in my alternate reality. I mostly write sweet romantic fiction, although with an occasional science-fiction or paranormal angle thrown in. I have interests in history, mathematics (D'oh), and cryptography. I'm also something of an Anglophile, and know that country pretty well. In addition to writing, research, and more writing, I volunteer with the scouts. I'm something of a nature-nut, enjoying long walks in the country with almost ultra-light gear, boating, and identifying wildlife. View all posts by Amelia