{"id":24,"date":"2026-02-21T11:11:42","date_gmt":"2026-02-21T11:11:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/botornot\/?page_id=24"},"modified":"2026-07-21T21:11:15","modified_gmt":"2026-07-21T21:11:15","slug":"turing-text-editions","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/botornot\/turing-editions\/turing-text-editions\/","title":{"rendered":"Turing text editions"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first Turing Text Edition<\/em> of Bot or Not?<\/strong> takes the project beyond fixed samples and into live interaction. It examines a simple question with increasingly serious consequences:<\/p>\n

After a short text conversation, how well can humans and AI systems distinguish a human partner from an AI one, and how does the interaction change their confidence?<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Led by Professor Claire Hardaker<\/a> and Dr Georgina Brown<\/a>, with major research assistance from Hope McVean<\/a>, this pilot uses the fictional dating app La Vida Lanca<\/em><\/a>. Each participant meets Alex, exchanges questions and answers, and then decides whether Alex was a bot\u2026 or not.<\/p>\n

Why interactive text?<\/h2>\n

The original Text<\/a>, Speech<\/a> and Music<\/a> Editions ask participants to judge fixed samples. Those samples can be examined repeatedly, but they can\u2019t respond, adapt, or make mistakes across a sequence of turns. It\u2019s a one-shot deal. And it’s the same for you, the participant. You read or listen. You judge. And then you move on.<\/p>\n

Interaction changes the problem significantly. A conversational partner must respond appropriately to what has just been said. They need to manage their questions and answers. They have to reciprocate interest, accommodate the other\u2019s style, and if they\u2019re an AI, they\u2019re going to need to maintain a plausible identity over time. Participants can also probe their partner rather than merely inspect what they have been given, and we found that some of our interactants did exactly this. One day we’ll tell you about the hammerhead shark test, which we especially enjoyed.<\/p>\n

All of this matters because conversational AI is increasingly being combined with more autonomous, agentic systems, and for fraudsters, this presents an extraordinary opportunity. In principle, such systems can create profiles, maintain multiple conversations, personalise their approaches, and operate continuously at considerable scale. Their human operator might decide to intervene only when a conversation becomes financially promising, but\u00a0 in some cases, if their system is good enough and the funds are arriving in their bank accounts, they may not need to intervene at all.<\/p>\n

We are of course talking about romance fraud.<\/p>\n

Why romance fraud?<\/h2>\n

Romance fraud depends on interaction. Offenders establish trust and emotional attachment over days, weeks, or even months before manipulating the situation into one where money becomes an issue. Sometimes they will play on anxiety, fear, guilt, or greed by introducing an emergency, an investment opportunity, or a travel problem. But sometimes they quite simply exploit kindness. A problem that can be solved by money arises. They appear to brave it out and say that they\u2019ll find the funds somehow. Don’t worry about it. They’ll manage. Somehow.<\/p>\n

And that’s when the well-meaning recipient of these messages might offer to step in and save the day, unaware that they’ve been lured into precisely this trap. This can even make the resulting scam all the more painful when it comes to light, since the victim may feel not just that they have been defrauded, but that they even perpetrated the act on themselves. In any case, the fictitious identity matters, and so too does the relationship built through language.<\/p>\n

The available figures reveal both the scale of the crime and the difficulty of measuring it consistently:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Source<\/strong><\/th>\nLatest official picture<\/strong><\/th>\nNote<\/strong><\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n
United Kingdom<\/strong><\/td>\nMore than \u00a3102 million<\/strong> was lost across 10,784 reports<\/strong> in 2025, according to the City of London Police<\/a>. The average reported loss was approximately \u00a39,500<\/strong>.<\/td>\nThese are reported losses. The police also note the emotional and psychological harm caused by sustained manipulation.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
United States<\/strong><\/td>\nThe FBI\u2019s 2025 Internet Crime Report<\/a> recorded 23,159 Confidence\/Romance complaints<\/strong> and approximately $929.3 million<\/strong> in losses.<\/td>\nThe FBI category is broader than romance fraud alone: it also includes other confidence schemes, including some involving family members or close friends.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Global<\/strong><\/td>\nINTERPOL\u2019s 2026 assessment<\/a> identifies romance scams and romance-baiting investment schemes among the offences conducted by scam centres now found around the world.<\/td>\nNational categories are not directly comparable, and romance-based schemes may subsequently be recorded as investment, cryptocurrency, impersonation or other fraud.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

These figures cannot responsibly be converted into one precise global romance-fraud total. Reporting systems differ, categories overlap, and perhaps most telling of all, many victims do not report what happened. INTERPOL highlights guilt, shame, and fear of blame as important barriers to reporting. The careful conclusion, and already a sufficiently grim one, is that romance-related fraud is a global, billion-dollar threat<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Generative AI can intensify that threat. The FBI has documented its use<\/a> to create fictitious profiles, believable messages, and synthetic pictures, audio, and video \u2013 and not just in one language, but translated across languages for deployment in different jurisdictions. Its 2025 report separately identified more than $19 million<\/strong> in reported Confidence\/Romance losses with a likely AI connection. AI can make an individual approach more persuasive, but its greater attraction to offenders may be scale: more identities, more conversations, fewer revealing mistakes, and less reliance on human conspirators who might eventually turn on them for a plea bargain. That\u2019s a lot of attractions in one package.<\/p>\n

The central research questions for the Turing Text Edition are:<\/p>\n