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Capital letter test is a foolproof way of sorting AIs from humans

A trick for asking questions using capital letters seems to baffle artificial intelligences like ChatGPT, while humans can easily give the right answer

By Chris Stokel-Walker

26 May 2023

There is an easy way to fool ChatGPT

Ascannio/Shutterstock

A clever use of capital letters could be an easy way to flummox artificial intelligences like ChatGPT, letting people distinguish them from humans in conversation.

The idea is reminiscent of the Turing test, first proposed by computer scientist Alan Turing in 1950. He said that an AI would be considered truly intelligent once we couldn’t distinguish its answers from a human’s. But now that large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT can sound convincingly human, Hong Wang at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and his colleagues wanted…

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