Imitation games: Turing, Menard, Van Meegeren

Abstract

For many, the very idea of an artificial intelligence has always been ethically troublesome. The putative ability of machines to mimic human intelligence appears to call into question the stability of taken for granted boundaries between subject/object, identity/similarity, free will/determinism, reality/simulation, etc. The artificially intelligent object thus appears to threaten the human subject with displacement and redundancy. This article takes as its starting point Alan Turing's famous `imitation game,' (the so called `Turing Test'), here treated as a parable of the encounter between human original and machine copy – the born and the made. The cultural resonances of the recent on-line performance of a `Turing Test' for computer generated art are then explored. Art traditionally taken to stand for all that is considered quintessentially human – and therefore resistant to mechanisation – represents in this sense a kind of `critical case' in the advance of machine intelligence. The article focuses on the moral status of the body, human agency, and social knowledge in the ongoing (re-)constructions of copy, original, and of the difference between them.