confederate effect

{{Short description|Human error of identifying a human as machine}}

{{confusing|date=July 2010}}

The confederate effect is the phenomenon of people falsely classifying human intelligence as machine (or artificial) intelligence during Turing tests. For example, in the Loebner Prize during which a tester conducts a text exchange with one human and one artificial-intelligence chatbot and is tasked to identify which is which, the confederate effect describes the tester inaccurately identifying the human as the machine.[http://www.alicebot.org/articles/huma/Huma.pdf The Confederate Effect in Human Machine Textual Interaction]

The confederate effect is the reverse of the ELIZA effect, which Sherry Turkle states is humans' "more general tendency to treat responsive computer programs as more intelligent than they really are":Sherry Turkle, in Life on the Screen –Identity in the age of the Internet, p. 101, 1997 that is, anthropomorphizing.

The phenomenon was seen in the University of Surrey 2003 Loebner Prize for Artificial Intelligence, when both confederate (tested) humans, one male and one female, were each ranked as machine by at least one judge. More precisely, Judge 7 and Judge 9 ranked the female 'Confederate 2' as "1.00=definitely a machine"; the male 'Confederate 1' was ranked "1.00=definitely a machine" by Judge 4 and Judge 9.[http://loebner03.hamill.co.uk/results.html 2003 Loebner Prize results] Also, the gender of these two hidden-humans were incorrectly identified (male considered female; woman considered man) in independent transcript analysis ('gender-blurring' phenomenon, see Shah & Henry, 2005).