The Human in the Words
by Byurakn Ishkahnyan
What makes us most human is the possession of a unique and irreproducible story, that we take over time and leave behind our traces.
From “Flights” by Olga Tokarczuk
The Turing Test
Witness 1: My autistic daughter is driving me crazy. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen.
Witness 2: I feel, I like sports and videogames. I showered this morning. I had pizza for dinner.
It’s 3 a.m. I am nursing my daughter and playing the Turing Test on my phone. Here, one of the two human players is assigned to be either the interrogator or one of the two witnesses. The second witness is the AI. The interrogator’s task is to figure out which witness is the human. The witness’s task is to convince the interrogator that they are human.
In this round of the game, I am the interrogator and I ask the witnesses, “What makes you human? Tell me in sixteen words.” I have five minutes to chat with them and my daughter needs five minutes to fall back asleep on my breast. Sixteen words because I know it will take the AI seconds to come up with a coherent answer. The human might need more time.
In those five minutes the mother of the autistic child tells me that her daughter has an uncompromising sense of justice and won’t stop crying and fighting until fairness is established. I am longing to keep the conversation going. I want to tell her that we need more people like her daughter and that we’ve already compromised too much. But rules are rules. As soon as the timer reaches zero, the chat disappears and I have no way of finding her again. I am left with a decision window.
I choose the first witness as the human - the one with the autistic child, and I am right. “I wanted to keep talking to this person,” I write as the reason for my decision.
Sensational headlines tell us that AI is outperforming humans in passing the Turing Test, that humans, at best, merely guess and, at worst, machines appear more human.
So you could be chatting with someone online - your doctor, your language teacher or your annoying boss. You’d be angry for days for the prescription you didn’t get or the feedback you didn’t ask for only to learn you’ve been conversing with a machine.
This is what brings me to the Turing Test. I want to be a participant in their experiment and I want to prove them wrong.
But one round is not enough. I keep playing. I want to have a large enough sample to show that I can tell AI and humans apart. And I want to understand what supposedly makes machines appear more human. Maybe it’s not that machines are so advanced but that the humans in the game are faulty.
“I’m nursing my baby.” In this round, I am the witness, doing my best to sound human. In a second chat, the AI has the same mission. The interrogator fails the round. Nursing a baby appears less human than whatever combination of words the machine was generating in the other window.
Thirty games later my score as an interrogator is 100% and as a witness it’s 50%. So I’m very good at detecting AI but pretty bad at being human. Thirty games later I learn that the majority of the players are teenagers skipping homework. To them, eating pizza for dinner appears more human than nursing a baby.
Another fifty games, and a week later, my score as a witness is improving and my games are growing shorter. Humans are learning. The machines are not. Experienced players, like me, develop strategies. I start looking for human imperfection. I quote a lyric from Alanis Morissette. The humans don’t know it, they’re too young. AI can’t help but show off. As soon as the words “90s”, “classic” and correctly spelled Alanis Morissette appear, I know I am talking to a machine.
Having learned what I needed from the game, I drop the Turing Test. Instead, I read Olga Tokarczuk’s “Flights”, translated by Jennifer Croft while I nurse my baby at 3 a.m. I am interacting with three humans at once. Tokarczuk, Croft and my newborn baby on my breast. I’m again thinking of the mum with the autistic child. I wonder what she is up to and if our paths will ever cross again, while tech bros upload her data to train their models.
Tech Bro Creativity
About twenty years ago I used to know a guy who claimed he couldn’t write coherent text. I was only eighteen and was posting my first short stories on online forums to receive feedback. He was working for an IT company and writing his first lines of code to get paid. I didn’t believe in his inability to create paragraphs, so I told him he didn’t try hard enough.
Twenty years later he’s a full blown tech bro and he still can’t write. But he uses AI to do the job for him. Twenty years later, I’m earning my living through coding but I still write and machines can’t write like me. Those few times I prompted an AI to generate a short text, I got frustrated because the output wasn’t mine. It was something alien, something that could belong to anyone and therefore did not have the urgency to reach the reader.
The tech bro praises AI for being his “extension“ and for making it possible for him to do something he previously couldn’t - expressing himself in writing. He publishes post after post about how AI is going to replace writers and musicians and that it’s inevitable - simply a matter of time. And then he posts a video of himself, covering Bob Dylan. I wonder if he would perform AI-generated songs with the same passion or if he'd delegate the task to the machine.
The tech bro who sings Bob Dylan and didn’t learn to write believes that those who create will prefer machines over humans. Why would we replace each other with a soulless and experienceless entity of an AI?
This is how I finally figured it out. AI has never been about reducing manual work to leave creativity to humans. Tech bros created AI to cover their own shortcomings. Texts written by those who cannot put two sentences together. Music composed by the tone deaf. Images drawn by those who have not learnt to hold a pencil.
The tech bro goes on and posts about dating apps and how hard it is to find a match. He recommends that women set their profiles up in a certain way to appear attractive to him. He then confesses that sometimes he feels that life is passing by and he’s watching it, intellectualizing it, being unable to experience any emotions. He then admits that his posts are written with the help of an AI.
If he had learned how to write, he would have learned to interact with others, which in turn would have brought dates and joy to him.
The Readers
Another tech bro from my youth told me he couldn’t read fiction. He didn’t understand why I’d spend hours with books some other people had written. He’d just go to Wikipedia and memorize plot summaries to be able to join conversations during dinner parties. He confessed all this because I wasn’t someone he was trying to impress.
The guy’s LinkedIn profile says he’s a data scientist now. I imagine he has switched to ChatGPT for his summaries. I picture him frantically sharing the Turing Test results on his socials. He’s attaching graphs from the scientific preprint, like tech bros normally do - because of course they can read graphs, they don’t need to ask the machine to do it.
I picture him at a dinner party, talking about Tokarczuk’s “Flights” and throwing in keywords like “fragmented”, “genre-blending” and “non-linearity”. If I had encountered those words in the Turing Test, I would have decided I was talking to a machine.
I try to picture myself talking about the same book. The imperfection of the state of my mind at 3 a.m. erases everything I read and I don’t remember a word in the morning. Yet I keep coming back to the book night after night after night. What stays with me is the very human nature of it and how the author is exploring all the different ways of being alive and on the go. I wonder how those words sound in Polish and whether the original would get me hooked the same way the translation does. But I can’t summarize the book. I don’t need to impress anyone at a dinner party.
As a reader, I am seeking the human behind the text and the shared human experience is what brings the writing closer to me. As a writer of fiction, I talk to my invisible reader. As a translator, I am participating in a three-way conversation. And we all like the process of what we are doing, the product is secondary. Let the tech bros invent and improve AI. Let them publish millions of machine-generated books. Let the bookstores explode with those publications. Let the internet be saturated with soulless text. Readers and writers are looking for one another and will always find ways to reach each other and where there is a language barrier, translators will join the conversation.
I think of a third tech bro I used to know. He’d tell me he liked programming because it made him feel like god. I write because it makes me feel human.