Echoborgs: Psychologists Bring You Face To Face With A Chat-bot - Neuroskeptic

A cyranoid is a person who speaks the words of another person. With the help of a hidden earpiece, a'source' whispers words into the ear of a'shadower', who repeats them. In research published last year, British psychologists Kevin Corti and Alex Gillespie showed that cyranoids are hard to spot: if you were speaking to one, you probably wouldn't know it, even if the source was an adult and the shadower a child, or vice versa. Now Corti and Gillespie are back with an even more striking experiment. In their new research, published in Frontiers in Psychology, they set up a scenario in which a human's words were controlled by a computer chat-bot.