AI test that worked on a scam bot, or someone who doesn’t speak English well: In the novel Blindsight, they’re discussing whether an alien they’ve encountered is sentient, so the linguist sends this message:

“Our cousins lie about the family tree, with nieces and nephews and Neanderthals. We do not like annoying cousins.”

“We’d like to know about this tree.”

Sascha muted the channel and gave us a look that said Could it be any more obvious? “It couldn’t have parsed that. There were three linguistic ambiguities in there. It just ignored them.”

The scammer ignored this and ChatGPT whiffed it. Claude gave a similar response in that it tried to explain a sentence that can’t possibly be explained. Neither caught the ambiguities. Happy hunting!