The Turing Test

A Writer Grapples with AI

They call it a Turing Test.

Person One sits down at a computer, typing back and forth with an unseen Person Two.

The subject of conversation doesn’t really matter. What matters is what Person One thinks about Person Two, whether something feels off. More to the point, does Person One think that Person Two is a person at all?

Can someone tell when the “person” on the other side is actually a machine?

Alan Turing’s simple test, first proposed in 1950, produced two camps.

In one were the humanists, the storytellers, and the artists—the Mary Shelleys and perhaps the John Henrys and the Ned Ludds. Who said people would always know the difference. That there would always be something special about humans.

In the other were the futurists, the technocrats, and the scientists—the Dr. Frankensteins and perhaps the Henry Fords and Cornelius Vanderbilts. Who said people would not always know the difference. That there would one day be nothing special about humans.

Time passed. The machine learned to play chess and predict weather, detect chemicals and recognize patterns, diagnose illness and drive cars.

But it never conquered language. It did not make art. Not really.

These were safe. The domain of humans.

Until recently.

When the large language models (LLMs) of various artificial intelligence (AI) companies were unleashed and the algorithms began to “write” stories and “create” art.

And camp one was left to stare in revulsion, wondering what’s left.

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That’s been me.

Of course it’s been me.

As a writer, I am engaged in the task of carving meaning from nothing. What should be nothing. Taking a bunch of warped lines, a measly twenty-six letters and a handful of funny characters, and arranging them in such a way as to make someone who I’ve never met feel like they are staring up at the moon. Or dipping their feet in a fast-flowing stream. Or being kissed for the very first time.

That is nothing short of magic. And in a world so badly in need of a little magic, I’ve come to view the task of writing as almost sacred.

But a machine can now produce a book of remarkable quality from a simple prompt. Yes, it does so by chewing through the entire online trove of human knowledge. Yes, it does so by devouring more water and energy than entire city blocks use in a year. But it does so.

In a matter of seconds.

While I’m still wrestling with the next sentence.

And it’s not just language.

The machine can now produce writing, music, video, and art of a quality surpassing most humans. And convincing to most humans. Which is to say that the machine seems to have won the ultimate imitation game.

There are those who resist this conclusion, who deride this technology and those who use it. Who claim that the work of the machine remains inferior, even downright ugly. Nothing but slop.

In their derision, they fail to see the bigger picture: that the machine will improve.

Others see this. That the writing on the wall is being updated faster than it can be read. There will soon be no space left.

So, they stake their claim. Through lawsuits and strikes, writers, actors, journalists, painters, models, and musicians have declared that they do not consent to the machine’s theft of their work or the disruption it will bring to their means of making a living.

I root for these efforts. And am cheered by the fact that so many others are doing the same: flocking to shows and exhibits, buying books and music, refusing AI on principle whenever possible.

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But, so far, this backlash toward AI’s impact has been focused on whether the artist, broadly defined, can continue to make a living.

For one, this focus is too long-delayed. For the economics of most writing, acting, reporting, and making of art has not made sense for quite some time.

No, the question is not whether we can find a way for artists to sell their work, to find a buyer for their work. It’s not even about how much we value art itself.

Do we fund it being taught in our schools?

Do we support it in our communities?

Most importantly, do we make it ourselves?

We should. But the question is still bigger than this. It has been for quite some time, though we have ignored it for as long as we could.

Oral historian Studs Terkel observed decades ago, “Perhaps it is this specter that most haunts working men and women: the planned obsolescence of people that is of a piece with the planned obsolescence of the things they make. Or sell. It is perhaps this fear of no longer being needed in a world of needless things that most clearly spells out the unnaturalness, the surreality of much that is called work today.”

The question is not whether we can tell if paintings and songs and stories are created by humans anymore. The question is whether we care.

Because we used to grapple with things. To argue over right and wrong. This was our most human debate. And now we find the question has shifted—to whether someone chooses to enter this debate at all.

As the artists sue and strike just like the truck drivers and machinists and retail clerks and letter carriers and teachers and nurses, as war becomes the latest betting line and empathy is met with scorn, as billionaires become trillionaires and children become collateral damage, we are faced with the question of whether we wish to be human at all.

Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than our soldiers. Because our soldiers used to look their enemy in the eye.

They used to have to.

Even a few years ago, as a soldier or perhaps a defense contractor sat at some distant surveillance room, they watched an adversary’s patterns, their movements, for weeks. Every weekday held the potential to observe an afternoon visit with his ailing mother. With Saturday came watching him play games in the yard with his son. Where they’d surely notice the boy, old enough to choose his own outfit, dressed like his father.

And they would never be able to forget the fact that it was under their watch that this boy’s father would be taken away.

But no more. Because it’s hard to kill a man—anguish to kill a man—, despot though he may be, if you witness him let slip a little of his humanity.

Far better to simply allow the AI to gather the necessary surveillance and select the target, whether an apartment in Iran or a fishing boat off the Venezuelan coast.

Far better to remain detached.

Far better to leave the enemy flat. Just an enemy—no more complicated than that.

Because when something is flat—or perceived to be flat—, it can be placed wherever it’s most convenient. Even hidden away entirely.

In this way, AI is just an extension of our tech-dependent age. In which everything has been stripped of nuance. Flattened for the screen. Packaged to be shared.

You start seeking out what’s sterile, what’s familiar. The Target, the Starbucks, the big hotel chain, the no-contact gym, the automated checkout line, the silent taxi, the online shopping experience.

Where the objective is simple: just point and click.

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And then you look up one day, and it all looks a little drab, it all looks kind of the same.

And you can’t recall what was once so special.

You can’t raise the sun, can’t unwind the clock, can’t return upstream.

You can’t so much as imagine that anyone would pick you out of a line-up, write you a song, write you a letter, tell you they love you.

The best you hope for is to be needed, to fill some sort of role.

Years ago, I heard of a film in which distant humans were hooked up to electrodes to control robots working in the field. It was about how society desired the utility of an immigrant’s labor but refused anything that made them more human, more complicated, than a body in a field.

I don’t remember what the film was called, but I know that it was science fiction.

Which is to say, it’s not surprising that we’ve gotten this way.

Most people, at least in this country, seem to swing between one of two outlooks. Either that human beings are a plague on this planet and that it’d be better off without us. Or that human beings are the pinnacle of all life, virtually the only movement on an otherwise inert rock.

The throughline is that we are an anomaly and either deserving of our excesses or not.

We understand being better or worse. We do not understand being in relation.

And I must admit that it gets to me sometimes. I find myself caught up in the questions of who I am and what am I doing and where am I going and what are we all doing and where are we all going. Which is to say, what is the point?

We date the Earth to 4.6 billion years ago. Humans to 350,000 years ago. The cognitive revolution to 35,000 years ago. From that point, comes all known art and bronze and farming and writing, every skyscraper and planned economy and atom bomb. And every god.

I spent the first half of my life believing in God and have spent the second believing in no God. Which is to say, I’ve come to accept that there is no singular cosmic reason for things like why we suffer, whether our prayers are answered, and why we are here at all.

We’ve been seeking a point, but the question has always been a reduction.

All our answers mere seduction.

Just a conveyor belt we’ve built for ourselves and we’ve been so long on this conveyor belt—seeking nothing but cheaper, nothing but bigger, nothing but more—that we know nothing else.

We are insecure apes that developed a little more awareness than what’s practical.

And our unwillingness to face this truth—or at least this possibility—is having terrible consequences.

For it’s this awareness, this attention—this thing we call consciousness, from which stems the conscience—that makes us human.

And it’s this attention that we’ve been giving away so freely.

It’s gotten to the point that we now feel naked without our pocket computers.

So addicted to our content that we’ve begun to see humans as nothing more than purveyors of that content.

And if a machine can spit out this content faster, so be it.

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In high school, I wrote a report defending the US decision to drop the first atom bomb on Hiroshima, which killed 70,000 instantly, and the second on Nagasaki, which killed 40,000 instantly. I then attended a college named for the president who’d made that decision.

I don’t remember what my report was called, but I know that I got an A.

Which is to say, it’s not surprising that we’ve gotten this way.

At least, it shouldn’t be.

But I still find myself looking at faces for some sign of agitation, some sign of protest, at the latest story degrading the human condition.

Asking what you think about the deportation of five-year-olds.

And if it bothers you to see so many living in poverty.

And if you’re okay with funding a genocide.

I know the questions aren’t really fair.

And it’s not all so severe.

As I find myself trying to make you laugh.

Listening to your dreams.

Inviting you to dance.

I guess I’m wondering what moves you.

Because I think that I and I think that you could help to make this world a little more beautiful.

And perhaps it will all continue to move as lightning and the machines will grow more refined in their mimicry and our questions will grow more urgent in their wake.

Namely, one question: what is the point?

Just two people sitting together, caught up in conversation.

Call it a Turing test.