Quote of the day

Glenn Beck is Fox 3.0. The sheer variety of his tics—weeping, clowning, etc. (for a video sampler, click here)—make him appear more a performer than a news broadcaster. But the effect is to convince his few critical viewers that he's a human performer, thereby obscuring the reality that he isn't human at all.

Our brief tour through the world of Artificial Intelligence has surely enabled you to spot the giveaway that this commentary is computer-generated. It lies in the high frequency of words expressing an exaggerated sense of disaffection: "trouble," "trust," "lying." Other words Beck favors: "socialism," "slavery," "destroy," and "confiscate." Clearly Fox News has some sort of Web crawler trolling hard-right Web sites to compile their newest bot's vocabulary. Another clue is Beck's face, which resembles the exaggeratedly pink and rounded human faces generated by Pixar's state-of-the-art computer animators. Pixar can design convincing-looking robots, but its people remain highly stylized. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Fox subcontracted to Pixar the visual component to its Beck software. Yet another clue is Beck's recent statement, in a New York Times profile, that he identifies with Howard Beale, the news anchor played by Peter Finch who cracks up on air in Network. In Beale's climactic speech in the film, he says: "We'll tell you any shit you want to hear." What better definition of what chatbots do best?

However they did it, my hat's off to Fox. For 59 years the world has waited for a machine that could pass the Turing test in some definitive, inarguable way. Fox News has done it. Let me be the first to nominate Roger Ailes for the unclaimed Loebner grand prize of $100,000. Can a Nobel be far behind?

-Slate's Timothy Noah takes a hard look at Glenn Beck.