In a historic breakthrough, artificial intelligence researchers at STEMford University developed a chatbot that successfully passed the Turing Test. The program, known as Chad Bot, achieved this astounding feat using only hardcoded responses written in the style of a dude on Tinder, to the disbelief of many in the computer science community. “Of course, Chad keeps track of conversation state, but it’s ultimately just a with some randomness thrown in,” explains Professor Ellen Turner, who spearheaded the project. “To begin a conversation, it usually starts off with a seemingly friendly ‘hey what’s going on?’ (or ). If the other person doesn’t reply within a certain time frame, it responds with a . Otherwise, it starts to select messages to send from a set of responses, ranging from mildly uncomfortable classics like ‘haha so what would you do if i was there lol’ to . very long cascading if-else statement eight long-winded rant on how that person was never attractive in the first place requests for sexual favors “After we finished building the program, we asked a variety of Tinder users to engage in two conversations: one with Chad and one with a real dude on Tinder,” Turner continues. “When asked to guess which conversation was with a real person and which was with a bot, participants couldn’t distinguish between the two, guessing correctly less than 50% of the time.” She pauses. “It’s amazing how successfully Chad fools people into thinking they’re talking to an actual human being, considering how banal or completely context-inappropriate its responses usually are.” But surely, we ask, Chad can’t possibly handle the full spectrum of human interactions with its limited set of hardcoded responses? “Easy,” Turner says, a twinkle in her eye. “If it can’t figure out a response, Chad just ghosts the user.”
