The hobbyists competing to make AI human

This weekend Steve Worswick will be pushing the boundaries of what it is to be human, attempting to fool a panel of judges into thinking they are chatting to another person while really they will be talking to a chatbot. But Steve isn't an engineer at Apple or Amazon, he is a designer from Leeds and the AI he is hoping will pass the test - Mitsuku - is one you have probably never heard of. The competition he is taking part in, the Loebner Prize, is one of the only real-world Turing Tests but is also relatively obscure in the highly-hyped world of artificial intelligence - and not without controversy. This year could be the last time Steve competes - the sponsor Hugh Loebner, a millionaire inventor who made his fortune from brass fittings, died in 2016 so there is no longer funding for the prize. The competition sees four judges conducting a series of conversations with both humans and bots which they then score out of 100.