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Cited by 109Cybernetics and Technology in SocietyPhilosophy and Theoretical ScienceEthics and Social Impacts of AI

Anthropomorphism and AI: Turingʼs much misunderstood imitation game

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Proudfoot, Diane·2011·Artificial Intelligence
DOI 10.1016/j.artint.2011.01.006
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  • The Turing Test has been characterized as 'anthropomorphism-proofed' because its design disincentivizes judges from anthropomorphizing the entity they are assessing.

    “Interestingly, the Turing Test has been characterized as “anthropomorphism-proofed” (72), because its design disincentivizes judges in the test setup from anthropomorphizing the entity they are assessing, as they must by default assume that they are interacting with a machine.”

    From The benefits and dangers of anthropomorphic conversational agents (2025) · cites this paper as [72]

    The Conclusion calls the Turing test “anthropomorphism-proofed,” and Section 3 says its design builds in a disincentive to anthropomorphize. The cited passages do not support the citing sentence’s further explanation that judges must assume by default that they are interacting with a machine; Section 3 describes a game with both a human and a machine contestant. (LLM, conf=0.86)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

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Research works printed but not linked: 57

  1. See, for example, N. Cassimatis, E.T. Mueller, and P.H. Winston, "Achieving human-level intelligence through integrated systems and research: introduc- tion to this Special Issue", AI Magazine, vol. 27, no. 2, 2006;
  2. also E.A. Feigenbaum, "Some Challenges and Grand Challenges for Computational Intelligence", Journal of the ACM, vol. 50, no. 1, 2003;
  3. D.B. Lenat, "The voice of the turtle: whatever happened to AI?", AI Magazine, vol. 29, no. 2, 2008;
  4. B. Goertzel, "Human-level artificial general intelligence and the possibility of a technological singularity: A reaction to Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near, and Mc- Dermott's critique of Kurzweil", Artificial Intelligence, vol. 171, 2007;
  5. J. McCarthy, "From Here to Human-Level AI", Artificial Intelligence, vol. 171, 2007, and "Formalizing common sense knowledge in mathematical logic", The Rutherford Journal: The New Zealand Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, vol. 3, www.rutherfordjournal.org;
  6. M. Minsky, P. Singh, and A. Sloman, "The St. Thomas common sense symposium: designing architectures for human-level intelligence", AI Magazine, vol. 25, no. 2, 2004;
  7. L.A. Zadeh, "Toward Human Level Machine Intelligence-Is It Achievable? The Need for a Paradigm Shift", IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, vol. 3, no. 3, 2008.
  8. See, for example, D. McDermott, "Level-headed", Artificial Intelligence, vol. 171, 2007;
  9. A. Sloman, "The well-designed young mathematician", Artificial Intelligence, vol. 172, 2008.
  10. J.B. Pollack, "Mindless Intelligence", IEEE Intelligent Systems, vol. 21, no. 3, 2006, pp. 50-56. All references to Pollack are to this paper.
  11. P.J. Hayes and K.M Ford, "Turing Test Considered Harmful", IJCAI-95 Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Montreal, Quebec, August 20-25, vol. 1, Morgan Kaufman, 1995, p. 974.
  12. B. Whitby, "The Turing Test: AI's Biggest Blind Alley?", in P. Millican and A. Clark eds, The Legacy of Alan Turing, Vol. I, Machines and Thought, Oxford Univ. Press, 1996, p. 58.
  13. P.R. Cohen, "If not Turing's test, then what?", AI Magazine, vol. 26, no. 4 (April), 2005, p.
  14. N. Block, "The Mind as the Software of the Brain", in E.E. Smith and D.N. Osherson eds, An Invitation to Cognitive Science, Vol. 3, Thinking, 2nd edition, MIT Press, 1995, p. 378.
  15. P.J. Hayes and K.M. Ford, 1995, pp. 972, 976.
  16. K.M. Ford and P.J. Hayes, "On Computational Wings: Rethinking the Goals of Artificial Intelligence", Scientific American Presents, vol. 9, no. 4, 1998, p. 79.
  17. A. Sloman, "The Mythical Turing Test". Sloman says, '[F]ar from proposing a test to answer the question whether machines can think or whether machines are intelligent, [Turing] actually decides (rightly) that the question is absurd' (ibid.). However, what Turing states is 'absurd' is any attempt to answer this question by means of 'a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll' ("Computing Machinery and Intelligence", Mind, vol. 59, 1950, p. 433). Despite his notorious remark that the question 'Can machines think?' is 'too meaningless to deserve discussion' (ibid., p. 442), Turing discussed this question at length (Copeland points this out in B.J. Copeland ed., The Essential Turing, Oxford Univ. Press, 2004, pp. 476-477). He discussed it in his 1950 paper (where, after all, he said that the question 'Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?' is a 'variant' of the question 'Can machines think?' (p. 442)), and in his radio broadcasts 'Can Digital Computers Think?' (A.M. Turing, 1951, "Can Digital Computers Think?", in B.J. Copeland ed., 2004) and "Can Automatic Calculating Machines Be Said To Think?" (A.M. Turing, R. Braithwaite, G. Jefferson, and M. Newman, 1952, in B.J. Copeland ed., 2004). In the first of these broadcasts, for example, Turing speaks of 'programming a machine to think' and 'the attempt to make a thinking machine', and he makes it clear that he is in favour of 'the theory that machines could be made to think' (pp. 485-486).
  18. A.M. Turing, 1950, pp. 452, 436, 446.
  19. A.M. Turing, 1948, "Intelligent Machinery", in B.J. Copeland ed., 2004, p. 431. For my analysis of Turing's approach to intelligence, see D. Proudfoot, "Rethinking Turing's test", forthcoming; D. Proudfoot and B.J. Copeland, "Artificial Intelligence", in E. Margolis, R. Samuels, and S. Stich eds, Oxford Hand- book of Philosophy and Cognitive Science, Oxford Univ. Press, forthcoming;
  20. B.J. Copeland and D. Proudfoot, "Artificial Intelligence: History, Foundations, and Philosophical Issues", in P. Thagard ed., Handbook of the Philosophy of Psychology and Cognitive Science, Elsevier, 2006. 15 On anthropomorphism in AI, see e.g. D. Proudfoot, "How Human Can They Get?", Science, vol. 248, 1999, p. 745 and "The Implications of an Externalist Theory of Rule-Following Behaviour for Robot Cognition", Minds and Machines, vol. 14, 2004, pp. 295, 302;
  21. B.J. Copeland and D. Proudfoot, 2006, pp. 445-446.
  22. A.M. Turing, 1950, pp. 456-457; "Intelligent Machinery: a Heretical Theory", c. 1951, in B.J. Copeland ed., 2004, p. 473.
  23. A.M. Turing, 1948, pp. 424-429.
  24. V. Braitenberg, Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology, MIT Press, 1984, pp. 83, 68, 19, 46, 83, 46, 41.
  25. D.W. Hogg, F. Martin, and M. Resnick, "Braitenberg Creatures", Epistemology and Learning Group Memo No. 13, MIT Media Laboratory, 1991, pp. 1-8.
  26. M. Yamamoto, " 'SOZZY': A Hormone-Driven Autonomous Vacuum Cleaner", Proceedings of the International Society for Optical Engineering, vol. 2058, 1993, pp. 212-213.
  27. D.C. Dennett, "When HAL Kills, Who's to Blame? Computer Ethics", in D.G. Stork ed., Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality, MIT Press, 1997, p. 358; "The Practical Requirements for Making a Conscious Robot", Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, vol. 349, 1994, pp. 140, 141.
  28. See, e.g., C. Breazeal and J. Velásquez, "Toward Teaching a Robot 'Infant' using Emotive Communication Acts", in Proceedings of 1998 Simulation of Adaptive Behavior, workshop on Socially Situated Intelligence; http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/sociable/publications.html.
  29. L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2nd edition, eds. G.E.M. Anscombe and R. Rhees, Blackwell, 1972.
  30. C. Breazeal, "Affective Interaction between Humans and Robots", in J. Kelemen and P. Sosik eds, ECAL 2001, LNAI 2159, Springer-Verlag, 2001, p. 585;
  31. C. Breazeal and P. Fitzpatrick, "That Certain Look: social amplification of animate vision", Proceedings of the AAAI Fall Symposium, Socially Intelligent Agents-The Human in the Loop, 2000, http://people.csail.mit.edu/paulfitz/publications.html.
  32. Another example of plainly false ascriptions in AI is the use of personal pronouns ('he' and 'she') to refer to machines. A recent case is E.S. Brunette, R.C. Flemmer, and C.L. Flemmer, "A review of artificial intelligence", ICARA 2009 -Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Autonomous Robots and Agents, 2009, IEEE.
  33. N. Block, "Psychologism and Behaviorism", Philosophical Review, vol. 90, no. 1, 1981, p. 10. 41 See, e.g., M. Minsky, P. Singh, and A. Sloman, 2004.
  34. For example, Turing-just as Pollack advocates-sought to understand how the human brain might emerge naturally; he said that '[t]he brain structure has to be one which can be achieved by the genetic embryological mechanism' and hoped that his work on neuron-like computation might clarify this process. (Letter from Turing to the biologist J.Z. Young. A copy is in the Modern Archive Centre, King's College, Cambridge (catalogue reference K1.78).)
  35. For example, in addition to his ground-breaking work on mechanized search in the Bombe, Turing anticipated computation by neural networks and was the first to use computer simulation to investigate the development of pattern in living things. On the Bombe, see B.J. Copeland ed., 2004, ch. 6 and pp. 353-355;
  36. B.J. Copeland and D. Proudfoot, "On Alan Turing's Anticipation of Connectionism", Synthese, vol. 108, 1996 (reprinted in R. Chrisley ed., Artificial Intelligence: Critical Concepts in Cognitive Science, Volume 2: Symbolic AI, Routledge, 2000);
  37. B.J. Copeland and D. Proudfoot, "Alan Turing's Forgotten Ideas in Computer Science", Scientific American, vol. 280 (April), 1999.
  38. On simulation, see A.M. Turing, "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis", Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, vol. 237, 1952 (reprinted in B.J. Copeland ed., 2004; see also pp. 507-518);
  39. A.M. Turing, 1950, p. 435. 47 Discussions of philosophical objections to the Turing test include: J.R. Searle, "Minds, Brains, and Programs", Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 3, 1980;
  40. R.M. French, "The Turing Test: The First 50 Years", Trends in Cognitive Science, vol. 4, no. 3, 2000;
  41. P.M. Churchland, "On the Nature of Intelligence: Turing, Church, von Neumann, and the Brain", in R. Epstein, G. Roberts, and G. Beber eds, 2008; D. Proudfoot, "Wittgenstein's Anticipation of the Chinese Room", in J. Preston and M. Bishop eds, 2002 and "Review of James Moor (Ed.), The Turing Test: The Elusive Standard of Artificial Intelligence", Philosophical Psychology, vol. 19, no. 2, 2005;
  42. N. Block, "The Mind as the Software of the Brain", p. 383. 50 The objection in this paragraph is based on B.J. Copeland, 2003, pp. 14-15.
  43. On this point, see e.g. J.H. Moor, "Turing Test", in S.C. Shapiro ed., Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence, John Wiley, 1987, p. 1126.
  44. A.M. Turing, et al., 1952, pp. 503-504.
  45. See B.J. Copeland, 2003, p. 15. 55 The recent philosophical literature on consciousness, zombie thought experiments, and machine consciousness is extensive. See, for example, D. Chalmers, "Facing up to the problem of consciousness", Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 2, no. 3, 1995;
  46. N. Block, "On a confusion about the function of consciousness", Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 18, no. 2, 1995;
  47. J. McCarthy, "Todd Moody's zombies", Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 2, no. 4, 1995;
  48. D. Dennett, 'The unimagined preposterousness of zombies', Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 2, no. 4, 1995;
  49. O. Flanagan and T. Polger, "Zombies and the function of consciousness', Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 2, no. 4, 1995;
  50. K. Balog, "Conceivability, Possibility, and the Mind-Body Problem", Philosophical Review, vol. 108, no. 4, 1999;
  51. R. Kirk, "The inconceivability of zombies", Philosophical Studies, vol. 139, 2008;
  52. A. Sloman, "Phenomenal and Access Consciousness and the 'Hard' Problem: A View from the Designer Stance', International Journal of Machine Consciousness, vol. 2, no. 1, 2010.
  53. J.R. Searle, "Twenty-One Years in the Chinese Room", in J. Preston and M. Bishop eds, Views into the Chinese Room: New Essays on Searle and Artificial Intelligence, Oxford Univ. Press, 2002, pp. 52, 64. 57 'Intelligence amplifier' is Lenat's term. D.B. Lenat, "Building a Machine Smart Enough to Pass the Turing Test: Could We, Should We, Will We?", in R. Epstein, G. Roberts, and G. Beber eds, Parsing the Turing Test: Philosophical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for the Thinking Computer, Springer, 2008, p. 281.
  54. A.M. Turing, c. 1951, p. 484; 1950, pp. 434, 435.
  55. D.C. Dennett, "Intentional Systems", in his Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology, Harvester Press, 1979, pp. 3-4.
  56. D.C. Dennett, 1979, p. 8. 70 Personal communication from Rodney Brooks. 71 A classic early text is S.E. Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion, Oxford Univ. Press, 1993.
  57. D.L. Waltz, "Evolution, Sociobiology, and the Future of Artificial Intelligence", IEEE Intelligent Systems, vol. 21, no. 3, 2006, p. 68.

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Authors
Proudfoot, D.
Affiliations
University of Canterbury (NZ)
Corresponding author
Proudfoot, Diane
ORCID
Proudfoot, Diane
Venue
Artificial Intelligence
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2011-04
Volume
175
Issue
5-6
Pages
950-957
ISSN
0004-3702 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1016/j.artint.2011.01.006
OpenAlex
W2089192547
Cited by
109
References
3
Citations by year
2026: 10 · 2025: 11 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 17 · 2022: 7 · 2021: 7 · 2020: 16 · 2019: 4 · 2018: 3 · 2017: 4 · 2016: 2 · 2015: 6 · 2014: 3 · 2013: 5 · 2012: 1
FWCI
22.42
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • Artificial Intelligence (publishedVersion)
  • University of Canterbury Research Repository (University of Canterbury) (submittedVersion)
  • PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation) (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Cybernetics and Technology in Society
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Philosophy and Theoretical Science
  • Social Sciences › Safety Research › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
Keywords
anthropomorphism, Turing test, machine intelligence, human-level AI, pretense, philosophy of mind, Alan Turing

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