How To Tell If You're Talking To AI On The Phone Or In Messages

“If you are scanning for typos or robotic phrasing, you are using a 2022 test on a 2026 system.”

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is heavily embedded in our lives – and has been since the 2010s, when voice assistants reigned supreme.

Now we’re in the age of generative AI, where millions of us converse with the technology on a daily basis. Most of the time we’re aware we’re chatting to AI (for instance, when you speak to a customer support bot or ask ChatGPT a question).

But other times, the lines can become more than a little blurred. It’s not always easy to determine whether the voice on the other end of the phone, or the message popping up via your dating app, is from a human or not.

AI-generated responses can appear in customer service chats and phone calls, social media comments and direct messages, dating apps, workplace messaging, education tools and even unsolicited texts from unknown numbers, said Matthew Freire, managing director of Use.AI.

We asked experts working with AI for their advice on how to determine whether you’re speaking to a human or not.

AI versus human: online messages

Forget the words, watch the behaviour

Roman Martynenko, founding engineer at Henry AI, said that rather than reading the text in front of you, you need to watch the behaviour on your screen.

“A modern chatbot writes warm, clean, grammatically perfect text, often better than the average person in a hurry. If you are scanning for typos or robotic phrasing, you are using a 2022 test on a 2026 system,” he said.

“What has not been solved is consistency, specificity, and backbone.”

Instead,........

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