How I Failed the Turing Test

By Jason Striegel

Some time around March, I started receiving a number of random instant messages from people I've never met before. Apparantly, my AIM alias had been added to at least two online lists and people all over the world were busy importing me as a buddy.

I say "at least two" because the people who contacted me fell into one of two camps: people who thought they were contacting a celebrity and people who thought they were contacting a robot. As I talked to more and more of these folks, I began to discover something really disturbing about myself:

I consistently fail to be perceived as human.

When this first started happening, a typical conversation with a celebrity admirer would go something like this (participant's IM handle is fabricated):

angelcutie42: hi!
jmstriegel: hey. what's up? do i know you?
angelcutie42: no
angelcutie42: someone gave me a bunch of screen names. i heard you are a celebrity.
jmstriegel: that's weird. i'm afraid i'm not a celeb at all.
angelcutie42: oh.
angelcutie42: bye

This was entertaining at first, but it quickly became a bit depressing as the angelcutie42s of the wired world would, one after the other, decide I wasn't worth talking to if I wasn't a celebrity. Want to know what it's like being dumped by a random groupie 5 times a day? Not good at all, thank you very much.

Read the rest here!