The Mimicry Game: Towards Self-recognition in Chatbots

In standard Turing test, a machine has to prove its humanness to the judges. By successfully imitating a thinking entity such as a human, this machine then proves that it can also think. However, many objections are raised against the validity of this argument. Such objections claim that Turing test is not a tool to demonstrate existence of general intelligence or thinking activity. In this light, alternatives to Turing test are to be investigated. Self-recognition tests applied on animals through mirrors appear to be a viable alternative to demonstrate the existence of a type of general intelligence. Methodology here constructs a textual version of the mirror test by placing the chatbot (in this context) as the one and only judge to figure out whether the contacted one is an other, a mimicker, or oneself in an unsupervised manner. This textual version of the mirror test is objective, self-contained, and is mostly immune to objections raised against the Turing test. Any chatbot passing this textual mirror test should have or acquire a thought mechanism that can be referred to as the inner-voice, answering the original and long lasting question of Turing "Can machines think?" in a constructive manner.