Turing's ghost
Gregory Narr · 2025
This chapter reveals a heteronormative ghost unleashed by dating app algorithms. It then recalls the transgender benchmark for thought Turing proposed in his seminal test of machine intelligence. In so doing, it suggests the potential for anti-oppression that queer culture is rooted in continues to haunt AI from the margins. A close reading of Ex Machina then illustrates how this potential is repressed by the culture of data colonialism: by subsuming the Turing test within a benchmark for superintelligence operationalized as Machiavellian domination and first achieved by an emasculating fembot. Despite this heteronormativity advanced by dating app algorithms and the broader culture of data colonialism, many sexual minority respondents seemed attuned to the queer potential of technology Turing&s;s ghost points to as they tried to date in an ethical manner. Highlighting one who recalled creating a safe space for sex on OkCupid&s;s website by infusing its algorithm with an everyday politics of anti-oppression, this chapter argues she beckons, along with Turing&s;s ghost, toward a world where machines value modes of encounter able to dispel the ghost of White heteropatriarchal man that has haunted perceptions of intelligence with coloniality since the Enlightenment.