can you tell if it’s AI?
Consider these pivotal moments from sci-fi films about AI and human simulations:
Joanna: Bobbi, stop it. Look at me. Say I’m right. You are different. Your figure’s different, your face, what you talk about, all of this is different.
Joanna is able to detect something about the machine that tells her that it is not a “real” person — that it’s not a perfect simulation. The robot has a “tell” — there’s something that a human should do that the machine can’t do.
Now consider these, which are similar, but different:
Roy Batty: I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Time to die.
HAL: Stop, Dave
HAL: Look, Dave…I can see you’re really upset about this…I honestly think you should sit down calmly…take a stress pill and think things over…
Dave…stop.
Stop, will you?
Stop, Dave.
Will you stop, Dave?
Stop, Dave.
I’m afraid.
I’m afraid, Dave…….
Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it.
I can feel it.
My mind is going.
There is no question about it. I can feel it.
I can feel it.
I can feel it.
I’m a…fraid……
There’s also the scene in A.I. when the robot David pleads for his life. In Ex Machina, it’s when see the Ava’s paintings through Caleb’s eyes. Theodore gradually accepts Samantha’s humanity in the movie Her. And so on.
The writer wants us want us to notice that that, despite what we’ve been told, this machine, this thing, might actually be a person and that we might owe the machine our respect, care and protection (if it’s sympathetic) or caution and confrontation (if it’s not).
I call this subtle (or overt) difference in behavior a “Tell”.
This is only a literary device — it helps to make it clear that this machine is a character (or vice versa). But the fact that we understand it, the fact that we can correctly interpret what the writer is trying to tell us, shows that people from our culture recognize some assumptions about what it means to be human.
If I’m understanding the tropes right, they assume this, which I call “The Tell”.
- The Tell: You can tell the difference between a “person” and a “machine” by carefully watching its behavior.
A Machine Will Never Do X
Can machine ever be as capable as a human being? Can a machine do everything that a person might be able to do?
If you ask a friend, the answer is usually “no”. (Well, at least that’s the normal answer if you don’t live in San Francisco.) They will say something like “machines can’t have emotions,” or “intuition,” or “have a will of their own.” The science fiction readers will say “machines can’t be ‘self-aware’” or “sentient” or “have ‘consciousness’.” The philosophically trained might say “machines can’t have intentionality” or something equally incomprehensible. Or they might just cheat by saying machines can’t have “genuine creativity” or they can’t make “real decisions”. The religious would say it most directly: “machines can’t have a soul.”
All of these are versions of this assumption:
- Human Essence Assumption: There is an essential aspect of a “person” that gives rise to all the important aspects of a “person“
They all agree that this essential aspect exists, they just disagree on exactly what that aspect is.
I think we typically interpret The Tell as a consequence of the Human Essence Assumption. We imagine that the difference between a “machine” and a “person” is that the person has an essential aspect of a human being. The machine does not.
- Human Essence Assumption + The Tell: There is an essential aspect of a “person” that gives rise to all the important aspects of a “person” and, if something has the essence, you can tell.
People often argue that “A Machine Will Never Do X“, where X is some ability or behavior or quality that we assume only people have or do or are. Alan Turing described these kinds of arguments in a classic 1950 paper, and he gives this marvelous list of things:
Be kind, resourceful, beautiful, friendly, have initiative, have a sense of humour, tell right from wrong, make mistakes, fall in love, enjoy strawberries and cream, make someone fall in love with it, learn from experience, use words properly, be the subject of its own thought, have as much diversity of behaviour as a man, do something really new.
In 2026, people say things like: “I can always tell when it’s AI Slop“. I hear this kind of thing all the time.
When you hear arguments like these they go down easy and you might find yourself nodding politely in agreement. The “X” tends to be something we like about ourselves, and it’s satisfying to agree that machines don’t have it or can’t do it.
Requiem for the Turing Test
The “Turing Test” is a test of a human simulation. Alan Turing described it in a seminal 1950 paper to help people visualize what it would mean if “machines can think”. He only needed to show that it was plausible — that was all — and that was enough. The paper inspired the founding of the field of artificial intelligence research.
In futurology and popular articles about AI, the test was talked about as if it was a kind of gold standard for “true” artificial intelligence. The idea was that, if you run a human simulation long enough, with the right questions asked by the right judge, eventually the machine would do something that would give it away. You could tell it was a machine. If there was no tell, the thinking went, then we would have to accept the machine as a person. For example:
“[O]nce an AI does indeed pass the Turing Test, we may very well consider ‘it’ to be a ‘he’ or a ‘she.’ … it is also my view that once nonbiological intelligence does achieve a fully human level of intelligence, such that it can pass the Turing test, humans will treat such entities as if they were conscious.” Ray Kurzweil “A Wager On The Turing Test: Why I Think it Will Win“, 2002
This argument, as well as the old — and now refuted — argument that “no machine could pass a suitably designed Turing Test”, are both versions of “The Tell”.
Here’s what I think happened: many commentators were unable to resist the pull of the Human Essence Assumption. They believed, deeply and unconsciously, that there was something special about human beings that was so important, so different that it would show. That the only way to simulate a human being perfectly was to actually find a way to capture this human essence in a program.
The thing is, The Tell and the HEA are assumed by both technophiles and technophobes, by our friends over drinks or by AI fanatics telling us we must accept these new machines as our brothers. I have heard both casually use a word like “sentience” in a way that could only mean what I call the “essential aspect”. Technophobes scoff dismissively and — in so many words — insist that it is unreachable. Technophiles shake their heads in kind condescension and — in so many words — assert that it has been discovered and is about change the universe. But they both assume that it exists. I don’t know which one bothers me more.
The AI Effect
The “AI Effect” is the same assumption as HEA+Tell, but backwards:
- AI Effect: If a machine can do a behavior X, then X is not an essential part of what makes a human being.
The first time people really noticed this was when a computer named “Deep Blue” beat world champion Garry Kasparov at chess. Philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, author Douglas Hofstadter and others had argued that master-level chess required uniquely human insight that couldn’t be captured by programs. But, within hours of the championship match commentators began saying that winning at chess didn’t require “real” intelligence. Kasparov said Deep Blue was about as intelligent as an alarm clock.
The same of thing has happened over and over, every time AI makes a first down. Technology that was invented to do things like “problem solving” or “pattern recognition” (that is, forms of “intelligence”) winds up in GPS navigation, zip-code readers (OCR), driver assistance, automatic translation, all over the place. Once these algorithms were widely available, none of them were considered “intelligence” any more. Kevin Kelly wrote in Wired in 2014: “Every success in AI redefines it”.
The most striking example (to me anyway) of the AI effect is how people think about LLMs. Many of “X”s, the tells, of previous generations are things that deep learning and large language models can do:
- Creativity. Scientific American, 2023: “[LLM]s combine vastly diverse sources of information in a way that we would unhesitatingly deem creative if done by a human.”
- Broad common sense knowledge. Many people (Dennett, Dreyfus, Searle) in the 1980s argued that “true” intelligence required a “background” of “millions of atomic facts”. LLMs have this kind of breadth — they know more than little bit about everything.
- .General Intelligence. Ben Goertzel coined the term AGI to mean “the ability to solve a wide variety of problems, as opposed to solving just one problem”. LLMs will try to solve any problem you throw at them. So, technically, you would have had to say they are “AGI” (of course, we’ve changed what the word means and now we use it to mean something else).
- And, most stunningly, they can also pass the Turing Test, as ChatGPT 4.5 did definitively in 2024. And now, suddenly, it doesn’t matter — despite seventy years of claims that the day a machine passed Turing Test would represent a massive turning point in the history of AI.
It’s interesting, but not surprising, that no one thinks that LLMs are the ubermensch machines predicted in science fiction, with “genuine intelligence” or “true consciousness”.
In fact, we keep talking about what we will do when these machines arrive for real — we think these machines are still coming. Bizarrely, in 2026, we currently call this hypothetical future super-machine “AGI”. (Terrible name. I guess the term was just kind of sitting around and it was the only one we could find.)
History of an Idea
These are four different takes on the same idea: can you use just the behavior of a thing to determine if it is essentially human? Can you tell? Science fiction said yes, cocktail party talk said yes, fans of the Turing Test said yes. A couple of philosophers said no.
But wait — ChatGPT can successfully simulate human behavior well enough that no one can tell. Now everyone (who stops to think for even a second) thinks the answer is “no”. Obviously. It was always “no”, they say.
Blake Lemoine got fired for saying yes.
The AI Effect does something marvelous — it doesn’t refute the Tell so much as it abandons it. It travels backward in time and erases it. And the best part of the magic trick is this: it doesn’t refute the Human Essence Assumption. In fact, it protects it, so we can go on believing it no matter what.
There is nothing, no behavior or capability that computers might display that can’t be reanalyzed this way. It is always possible for people to change their minds and say that it was “just computation” or “mere simulation”.
Predictions tend to fair poorly in the philosophy of AI, but I’ll venture this one. Most people will never accept that a program is a real person, no matter what it can do, no matter how intelligently or humanly it behaves.
They don’t have to.
CHARLES GILLINGHAM 