The Queer Roots of Artificial Intelligence: How Turing’s Drag Show Birthed ChatGPT

Hold onto your wigs and binary codes, folks, because we’re about to spill the tea on artificial intelligence’s shadiest secret: its roots in queer theory. Yeah, you heard that right. In this digital age where AI like ChatGPT can breeze through the Turing test like a seasoned pro, we often forget the test’s own playful beginnings—ones tangled up in gender-bending and a whole lotta sass.

Turing’s Queer Legacy

Let’s rewind to a time before smartphones, the internet, heck, even before disco. It’s the mid-twentieth century, and Alan Turing, a bona fide genius and the OG codebreaker who cracked the Enigma code during World War II, is busy laying the groundwork for the field of computer science. But here’s the gag: Turing was a gay man living in a time when being gay was, like, totally illegal.

Now, history books love to relegate Turing’s sexuality to a footnote, a mere detail in the grand narrative of his scientific achievements. But honey, let me tell you, that sexuality wasn’t just a footnote—it was the whole damn preface! It permeated his work, his thinking, and yup, even the very test he devised to measure a machine’s ability to think like us.

The Imitation Game: A Drag Show in Disguise

Fast forward to, and this is where it gets juicy. In his groundbreaking paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Turing introduces the world to the “imitation game,” a thought experiment designed to answer the age-old question: Can machines think? But hold up, because this game wasn’t your typical philosophical pondering. Imagine this: a man pretending to be a woman, trying to convince an interrogator through a series of typed messages that he’s the real deal.

Gender-bending, anyone? Turing wasn’t just interested in intelligence; he was fascinated by how we perform and perceive it, how we construct our identities through language and, dare I say, a little bit of theatricality. In fact, he explicitly proposed replacing the man in his game with a machine, drawing a direct parallel between AI and, you guessed it, drag performance.

Drag as a Lens for Understanding AI

Think about it: drag queens, with their larger-than-life personas and masterful manipulation of gender norms, are basically walking, talking embodiments of artificiality. They take the raw materials of gender—clothing, makeup, mannerisms—and mold them into something new, something subversive, something that makes you question everything you thought you knew about what’s “real” and what’s “performance.”

And that’s precisely what AI does with language! It takes the raw data of human communication—words, grammar, even emotions—and reassembles it, creating text that’s often indistinguishable from our own. But just like a drag queen’s meticulously crafted illusion, AI’s intelligence is a carefully constructed performance, a dazzling display of mimicry that leaves us both amazed and a little bit shook.

Turing’s Playful Approach

Now, some stuffy academics might scoff at the idea of comparing AI to a drag show. But Turing himself, bless his mischievous soul, wouldn’t have batted an eyelash. His writing on the imitation game is peppered with a sly wit, a playful exploration of gender and intelligence that’s about as subtle as a feather boa in a library. He even went so far as to specify that the machine in his thought experiment should have “shingled” hair, a detail that screams “camp” louder than a room full of RuPaul’s Drag Race contestants.

For Turing, the question of whether machines could think wasn’t some dry, abstract conundrum. It was a chance to poke fun at our own assumptions about gender, identity, and what it means to be human. He understood that the line between real and artificial, between human and machine, is a lot blurrier (and a lot more fabulous) than we might think.

The Erasure of Gender in Modern Turing Tests

Sadly, somewhere along the way, the playful, subversive spirit of Turing’s original vision got lost in translation. Today’s Turing tests, with their emphasis on cold, hard logic and their sanitized, gender-neutral language, feel like a far cry from the deliciously queer game Turing envisioned. It’s like someone tried to recreate a John Waters film without the bad taste or the beehives—technically impressive, maybe, but utterly devoid of the original’s subversive charm.

By stripping away the gendered elements of Turing’s test, we’ve inadvertently erased a crucial part of its DNA, a part that speaks to the inherently performative nature of intelligence itself. It’s like trying to understand the magic of drag by simply reading a list of makeup products—you might get the technical specs, but you’ll miss the heart and soul of the art form.