We've mentioned the Turing test before as a way of finding out whether a computer is intelligent enough to trick an interrogator into thinking it is human. Some text generation tools generate essays that could possibly make sense, however, contain no intellectual merit behind the appearance of scientific language.
The same could be said of some human essays and utterances, however. Nassim Taleb, in his book Fooled by Randomness, argued a person should be called unintelligent if their writing could not be distinguished from an artificially generated one (a reverse Turing test). In a similar vein, Alan Sokal's 1996 hoax article Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, accepted by and published in a well-known social science journal, was a deliberate attempt by the university professor of physics to expose a lack of intellectual rigor and the misuse of scientific terminology without understanding. A possible...
