Turing Test
Cats: Internet, Tech, Video|Step 1: Click this link and view the video before reading the article.
Would you know Emily is not real if you weren’t told that?
Step 2: Read the article. Pretty wild, huh?
I think they missed the boat in releasing the video with the caveat that the model is, in fact, computer-generated. I wouldn’t have noticed until they started messing with her face. Even then, I would have assumed it was new technology to change the appearance of someone’s face, not rendering the whole model out of bits.
I’m a big fan of the ‘uncanny valley’ concept, because I prefer less realism in computer animation, for the most part. Look at the movie Beowulf or Polar Express, and I didn’t even want to see those movies because they were getting so close to realism that it was creepy.
But Emily is so close to realism that if I didn’t know any better, she would have indeed passed my Turing test*. Look it up. Then watch Blade Runner and wonder what the future holds.
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*Okay, I know the Turing test is to determine the human-ness of an artificial intelligence. This isn’t technically about the intelligence, but about human appearance. So what? If I were shown a video of Emily where I wasn’t tipped off overtly that she was computer-generated, I would have assumed this was just a regularly filmed, real-world video. Add machine intelligence to animation like that, and we have our first virtual replicants. Take away the intelligence, and just put a really good machine voice generator to provide the voice, and you’ve got a news anchor that can run the 24-hour news cycle. I wonder how long it would take people to realize that a really well-animated TV ‘personality’ wasn’t real? I think that would be a great experiment.
