Poll

Computer programmers have a nifty hypothetical arrangement to test artificial intelligence. Called the Turing Test, it involves a human sitting at a terminal and basically instant messaging to the test program. If the human cannot tell if the entity on the other end is human or computer, we will have finally developed real artificial intelligence.

The people leaving comment spam on my August 30 blog entry fail this test miserably. It's fairly obvious that the comments are being left by an automated program that plugs the title of the post into a text advertisement that does not do a very good job of disguising itself as a comment from a real human reader of Penguin Perspectives.

Blogger allows me to block this, but it would add a step for you legitimate commenters. If I set this to block comment spam, you all would have to do the word verification thing, where you enter the series of letters that is shown on the screen like a Salvador Dali painting, before you could leave comments.

I like getting comments. If you comment, I know you're reading--except for the dumb spambots. I don't want to do anything that would turn actual people off from making legitimate non-ad comments. At this stage, if anyone says the extra step would keep them from commenting, I'll leave it as is and we'll just all laugh at how stupid the comment spam is.

Poll question: would you be less likely to leave comments if you had to go through the extra step of verifying that you are a human?