A rather strange, and more than slightly ironic, cautionary tale: Dr. Robert Epstein, UCSD psychologist, editor of the scientific volume Parsing the Turing Test, and co-founder, with Hugh Loebner, of the Loebner Prize, subscribed to an online dating service in the winter of 2007. He began writing long letters to a Russian woman named Ivana, who would respond with long letters of her own, describing her family, her daily life, and her growing feelings for Epstein. Eventually, though, something didn’t feel right; long story short, Epstein ultimately realized that he’d been exchanging lengthy love letters for over four months with—you guessed it—a computer program. Poor guy: it wasn’t enough that web ruffians spam his email box every day, now they have to spam his heart?

Brian Christian, The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive (2011)