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AI test that worked on a scam bot, or someone who doesn't speak English well: In the novel Blindsight, they're discussing whether an alien they've encountered is sentient, so the linguist sends this message:
"Our cousins lie about the family tree, with nieces and nephews and Neanderthals. We do not like annoying cousins."
"We'd like to know about this tree."
Sascha muted the channel and gave us a look that said Could it be any more obvious? "It couldn't have parsed that. There were three linguistic ambiguities in there. It just ignored them."
The scammer ignored this and ChatGPT whiffed it. Claude gave a similar response in that it tried to explain a sentence that can't possibly be explained. Neither caught the ambiguities. Happy hunting!
True! I was thinking in the context of a fake job interview which is where I tested this. One would expect a return question in a serious discussion.
Blindsight is easily the most brilliant book I've ever read. Every sentence is packed. Best part is one can read it "casually", just burn through it like I did the first time, or really take a moment to feel it and unpack it all.
One of my fav bits is Siri talking about giving his gf flowers!
"I brought her flowers one dusky Tuesday evening when the light was perfect. I pointed out the irony of that romantic old tradition—the severed genitalia of another species, offered as a precopulatory bribe—and then I recited my story just as we were about to fuck. To this day, I still don't know what went wrong."
Blindsight is a solid book, but if it'd had a really skilled editor it coulda been one of the all-time greats. As it is, it lags a bit in the middle (when they start exploring that phenomenon) and the author doesn't always seem in control of the ideas being worked with.
MFer comes up with some pretty good ideas tho. One of these days I gotta finish reading "Echopraxia".