Do you know what an Echoborg is? Would you know if you were dealing with one? An Echoborg is a human, whose actions are entirely dictated by Artificial Intelligence, or AI. They are a friendly, human interface for a machine. The interactive theatre piece I am Echoborg explores this bold new world of living with intelligent machines by giving audiences the chance to talk to a custom-built AI chatbot through an Echoborg who repeats its words. The audience are set a challenge - to discover a best possible outcome for relations between humans and intelligent machines but the AI itself has another agenda and it can also learn from the audience.

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.