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Want to convince someone you're not a robot? Use the word 'poop'

Well, when you think about it, this makes complete sense.

Mark Serrels Editorial Director
Mark Serrels is an award-winning Senior Editorial Director focused on all things culture. He covers TV, movies, anime, video games and whatever weird things are happening on the internet. He especially likes to write about the hardships of being a parent in the age of memes, Minecraft and Fortnite. Definitely don't follow him on Twitter.
Mark Serrels
2 min read
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We've all heard of the Turing Test, designed in 1950 by Alan Turing in a test of a machine's ability to mimic human behavior.

But researchers at MIT and the University of Pennsylvania tried to do something a little different. They tried to create a Minimal Turing Test. Well sort of.

They asked themselves a question: If you could only use one word to convince a human you weren't a robot, which word would you choose?

One thousand participants suggested 400 words. The most commonly suggested words related to concepts most people think an artificial intelligence might have difficulty understanding -- words like "love" or "soul". But plenty of words were suggested more than once, words like "compassion" or "mercy". Even swear words like "shit". One curious choice made by a number of people: "please".

The researchers put all the suggested words into distinct categories, and then selected the most nominated word from each category.

Those words were: "love", "please", "mercy", "human", "compassion", "empathy", "robot", "banana", "alive" and "poop".

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The next step: Show 2,000 new participants a random combination of two of these 10 words, and have them select which word they thought was chosen by a human, and the word chosen by a robot.

The word most likely to convince another human being you're not a robot?

Ladies and gentlemen, that word is "poop".

To be clear, robots or AI were not involved in this test -- it was a purely psychological experiment, designed to see which word would most likely convince other human beings that someone else was also human.

And when you think about it, poop makes sense. I see that word and I'm thinking "robots can't poop". Poop would be a remarkably difficult word for an artificial intelligence to parse, let alone use in an attempt to convince human beings it wasn't a robot.

You can check out the full study in ScienceDirect.

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