Only One Movie Robot Passes the Turing Test (It's Not the Porn Bot)

In Ex Machina, a billionaire builds a robot girl out of one lonely programmer's porn search history, then asks him whether she's really conscious. She's one of nine. A viewer asked whether movie robots would actually pass a Turing test, so we gave nine of them Alan Turing's real rules from 1950: no body, a teleprinter, five minutes, and a machine that has to pretend to be human. Eight fail. One passes. Another day in the yard!!!! AMEE (Red Planet), Johnny 5 (Short Circuit), the T-800 (The Terminator and Terminator 2), Ash (Alien), Bishop (Aliens), HAL 9000 (2001: A Space Odyssey), Sonny (I, Robot), Ava (Ex Machina) and Rachael (Blade Runner), each scored on three lines: does it talk, does it lie about being a machine, and does it slip. Plus the 2025 UC San Diego study where GPT-4.5 was picked as the human 73% of the time. Thanks to @jamesabernethy7896 for the idea (it came from the comments under our Oblivion video). Full spoilers for all ten films. CHAPTERS 00:00 Intro 01:51 Turing's rules (1950) 04:52 AMEE and Johnny 5 07:12 The Terminators 11:08 Ash and Bishop 13:18 HAL 9000 16:02 Sonny 18:13 Ava 20:25 Rachael 23:22 Alive, or just programming? Narrated by: Me :) SOURCES AND IMAGE CREDITS Turing, A. M. (1950). "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." Mind 59(236): 433-460. Every quote on screen is from the paper. https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/LIX.236.433 Jones, C. R. and Bergen, B. K. (2025). "Large Language Models Pass the Turing Test." UC San Diego. arXiv:2503.23674 (figures and abstract shown on screen) https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674 Weizenbaum, J. (1966). "ELIZA." Communications of the ACM 9(1): 36-45. ELIZA conversation screenshot: Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Wikipedia, "Poole versus HAL 9000" (the chess game and the "bishop three" notation slip) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poole_versus_HAL_9000 Alan Turing, 1951, Elliott & Fry (Wikimedia Commons, public domain). Joseph Weizenbaum, 1982 (Wikimedia Commons). Forth Bridge (2022) by MrMasterKeyboard, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. UC San Diego aerials: "Pacific Coast Drone Footage" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjPQZjwggLw Archival footage: U.S. National Archives / FedFlix collection on archive.org (public domain): Library Stock Shots #986 and #1369, The President Accounts, Universal Newsreel (including the 1950s pageant stage), Operation Doorstep, The Fight for Life, The Truman Story, U.S.A., Lady Marines, If You Work For Yourself, Henry Ford and Grandsons, Making Ford Advertising Pictures, Fisk University and Virginia Union University (Negro Education and Art in the U.S.), Women Astronauts Training. FILMS The Terminator (1984), dir. James Cameron. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), dir. James Cameron. Alien (1979), dir. Ridley Scott. Aliens (1986), dir. James Cameron. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), dir. Stanley Kubrick. Short Circuit (1986), dir. John Badham. Red Planet (2000), dir. Antony Hoffman. I, Robot (2004), dir. Alex Proyas. Ex Machina (2014), dir. Alex Garland. Blade Runner (1982, The Final Cut), dir. Ridley Scott. Every film line quoted is from the film itself, checked against the film's own audio. The verdicts are our reading of Turing's 1950 rules applied to what each film shows; Turing himself never tested a movie robot. #TuringTest #MovieRobots #ShipYard