Is she real?

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My friends have a student lodger from China. Apparently she is very clever and already has a degree in physics but is now studying medicine. She is the perfect tenant/guest and speaks near perfect English. Last week she accidentally lost her key to their garage, while my friends were away for the weekend. So she sent a couple of text messages expressing her remorse at this careless accident, explaining that she had engaged the services of a locksmith to replace the key, hoping that she had not caused them distress by her actions, and asking if it would be acceptable for her to borrow her host’s key for the time being until the new key was ready (her actual messages were much longer and in more flowery language than this, but I can’t remember them verbatim, unfortunately). At first I thought perhaps she had used ChatGPT or something similar to write the messages for her. But by the end of the second one I started to think that perhaps she wasn’t human at all! My friends say she does eat and do other normal ‘human’ things like ride a bicycle – although very dangerously – but I’m not convinced. I think perhaps they have been duped into housing a robot! I should have said that the photo is actually of a robot named Jia Jia that (who?) was unveiled in 2016 and was able to hold basic conversations. Undoubtedly things have progressed in the eight years since then. All rights reserved. © Text copyright Fleur 2024.