The Turing Test

The relationship between AI and deception was initially explored by Alan Turing, who famously proposed in 1950 a practical test addressing the question “Can machines think?” This chapter argues that Turing’s proposal of the Imitation Game, now more commonly called the Turing test, located the prospects of AI not just in improvements of hardware and software but also in a more complex scenario emerging from the interaction between humans and computers. The Turing test, by placing humans at the center of its design as judges and as conversation agents alongside computers, created a space to imagine and experiment with AI technologies in terms of their credibility to human users. This entailed the discovery that AI was to be achieved not only through the development of more complex and functional computing technologies but also through the use of strategies and techniques exploiting humans’ liability to illusion and deception.