ChatGPT can now easily pass any Turing Test, a measure of successful AI proposed by computer science founder Alan Turing. But modern Turing tests miss the most interesting part of the original Turing test: the gender change.
I can usually spot AI writing in my students’ work by the overuse of words like “drill down,” but the accuracy of AI is impossible to deny. AI is being integrated into every aspect of our written culture, from news sources to classrooms to medicine. But in 1950, Turing’s ideas about AI were visionary, creative, and, when I read them, surprisingly strange.
Turing is considered one of the “fathers” of digital computing, and he is also celebrated during Pride Month for having the courage to be almost completely openly gay at a time when England had laws against homosexuality. Turing’s sexuality is usually cited as being instrumental to his technical achievements, but I don’t think it was. I’ve been reading what Turing wrote and I see a lot of strange ideas. When I read Turing’s description of the imitation game, I saw a drag show at the beginning of AI
In 1951, less than five years after the first fully programmable digital computer was up and running, Turing spoke on the BBC and called the computer a “mechanical mind”. He asked the audience to consider the possibility of a machine thinking like a mind. This caused quite a backlash. Turing published a defense of his ideas in the essay Computing Machines and Intelligence. And he replaced the question “Can machines think?” with imitation play.
Turing begins with a gender-bending parlor game: “It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B) and an interrogator (C). The interrogator remains in a room separate from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the two is the man and which is the woman.”
Turing envisioned both gender and intelligence liquid.
Cheating is the rule in this game. Turing says that a woman must be honest. Her best strategy is to be herself, he explained. But the trick is for the man to introduce himself as a woman: “This is A [the man’s] object in the game to try to cause C [the interrogator] to make a wrong identification.
Turing then takes up his gender-confounding game and adds a further twist: “What will happen when a machine takes the role of A [the man] in the game? Will the interrogator get the wrong decision as often when the game is played this way as when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, “Can machines think?” “
So, the Turing test started as a competition between a woman and a man, where a man pretends to be a woman. The human is then replaced by a computer. Read literally, the AI parallels a man posing as a woman. It was a computer in drag.
This drag show doesn’t have the glamour, death drops and butterfly eyelashes that we find in RuPaul’s Drag Race. We don’t have queens, both trans and cis, moving away. Still, I find hints of drag culture at the heart of Turing’s hopes for his “mechanical mind.”
Drag culture abundantly pushes the elastic sensibility of what a gender can become. It’s high camp and high art. Drag can be found on the dance floor of clubs in most small towns and on prime time television. RuPaul has been saying for decades, “We’re all born naked, and the rest is misery.” And he also explains that drag queens aren’t men dressed as women because “Women don’t really dress like us. We wear clothes that are ultra-feminine, that represent our culture’s synthetic idea of femininity. Queens don’t try to fit in as women, they’re too awesome and bitches for that.
Philosopher Judith Butler writes in her latest book, Who’s Afraid of Sex? that a guiding question for understanding drag is, “How does fiction convey truths we cannot understand through other means?” There is a deeper truth to drag performance that has nothing to do with the authenticity or naturalness of gender. Drag shows how gender is created, explored and inflated in fantasy dreams.
In his test I see Turing playing with the representation of intelligence. He blows it away and explores what intelligence can become. The machine makes no claim to natural gender or authentic intelligence. It’s a show. And if the show fails the judge, she wins. Turing was amused by his suggestion. His friend Norman Routledge described Turing in general as “screaming and giggling all the time”. And when Turing read a draft of his essay on the imitation game to his best friend, Robin Gandy, he was apparently bubbling with laughter throughout his reading.
As the test continues, Turing continues to dress up the computer. Turing wrote wittily that the judge should not be in the same room as the contestants: “We do not want to punish the machine for its inability to shine in beauty contests.” Turing then had the interrogator ask the computer questions such as: “Please Will X tell me the length of his hair?’
The computer replies, “My hair is bristly, and the longest strands are about nine inches long.” I love that Turing had the computer describe her excessively long, “brissy” hair, which was a complex hairstyle of piled-up layers of curls.
Most modern versions of the Turing Test delete the gender-related components of the test. However, I think this is an important moment in queer history. Turing envisioned both gender and intelligence as fluid.
In his defense of thinking machines, Turing commented, “Machines surprise me with great frequency,” and this was a sign in favor of the computer. His dream was for an AI that could “do something really new.” I feel the same way. I am inspired by creative projects, especially Vauhini Vara’s essay Ghosts, in which her engagement with ChatGPT led her to tell a story of grief that she could not have done alone.
ChatGPT can easily pass the Turing test, but I’m cautious. I spoke with my colleague, Professor Dan Frank, who is a specialist in emerging AI writing. Frank has spent the last year helping UC administrators and faculty prepare ourselves and our students for writing and critical thinking with ChatGPT. He explained that in some ways a chatbot cannot create anything original. “It can’t come up with anything new because it literally functions by predicting and choosing the ‘most likely’ next words,” he said.
But in action the result is something unique. Frank admitted, “The part of ChatGPT that I like is the fact that it does new and surprising things with its language algorithms. It is such a strange beast, this thing made of our combinations and recombinations of our world text. It builds on what already exists and combines it in a way that can feel fresh.
Turing anticipates this when he writes about humans: “Who can be sure that the ‘original work’ he has done is not simply the growth of a seed planted in him by teaching, or the effect of following well-known general principles?” Turing’s claim is that artificial intelligence and human intelligence are not so different.
ChatGPT is actually too good at passing as human. In May, OpenAI released a demo of its “Sky” voice feature, and the voice was impressively warm and catchy. And the voice was so realistic that it eerily resembled the voice of one particular woman: Scarlett Johansson. Johansson, who played the AI platform in the film her, was asked by OpenAI if they could use her voice for their ‘Sky’ audio technology. She said no and when asked again she said no again. OpenAI demonstrated a voice that sounded uncomfortably close to Johansson’s anyway. After widespread objections, the startup suspended the voice that sounds like Johansson’s. But their assistant function will continue to use human voices; The women’s voices in particular sound like a man’s fantasy of a yielding, submissive woman.
Like the Turing Test, ChatGPT can pose as a woman. But now she serves. The AI quickly becomes the most boring version of a woman it can be because that’s exactly what many of its users want. In Turing’s imagination, the representation of femininity on the computer was a game; it was a trick. And she was playing to win.
Two years after Turing proposed his Turing Test, he was charged and convicted of “gross indecency” after law enforcement discovered he had been in a sexual relationship with another man. Turing was given a choice: chemical castration or prison. He opted for chemical castration, an estrogen-based hormone therapy that preserved his freedom but destroyed his sex drive.
The treatment causes bodily changes over which Turing has no control: his breasts grow, his body swells with weight and water, and his voice begins to change. He wrote to Rutledge that the verdict would change him in ways he could not know. But what he feared most was that his sexuality would undermine his AI dreams. He wrote:
I fear that the following syllogism may be used by some in the future.
Turing believes that machines think
Turing lies with men
Therefore, machines do not think
your in trouble
Alan
In the end, however, Turing’s fears did not come true. Even his alleged “crimes” of homosexual acts were eventually pardoned by Queen Elizabeth II in 2013, and the UK Parliament granted pardons to all men convicted under his archaic homophobic laws. Today he is remembered as a pioneer of artificial intelligence and digital computing – and an LGBTQ+ icon who was willing to live openly as a homosexual and challenge notions of gender conformity within his coded Turing Test at a time when it was dangerous to do this .
What I find exciting about drag is that it takes things from stereotypes of femininity and amplifies, distorts and blinds them. I love staying up late on Sundays to stuff dollar bills into the straps of Valerie Storm’s sequined bra. She’s the star of Santa Barbara’s drag scene, and she plays in a shitty bar that smells like sweat, booze, and Red Bull. On Sunday evenings the world seems to spin under the gravity of the Queen’s performance.
Drag transforms femininity into something completely different. And at best, that’s what I hope for AI as well. It’s not that it reproduces human women or human intelligence so closely that we can’t tell the difference. ChatGPT and other chatbots can draw from the language they’re given and turn what humans have written, what we’ve thought, argued, sung and sketched into something I know to be fiction, fascinating a fiction from which I can watch it away.
