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Show HN: How clanker are you? A reverse Turing test

A developer released 'how clanker are you?', a reverse Turing test that measures how surprising a user's writing is to language models. Users finish eight sentences and receive a score based on token surprisal, with low surprisal indicating machine-like writing. The demo mode uses simulated scores due to lack of funding for real model inference.

read1 min views1 publishedJul 3, 2026
Show HN: How clanker are you? A reverse Turing test
Image: source

are you?

// a surprisal Turing test, reversed. Language models predict the next token. You, allegedly, do something more interesting. Finish eight sentences; we measure how surprising your writing is to the machines.

low surprisal = the model saw you coming. high surprisal = congratulations, human.

⚠ demo mode: inference isn't funded yet — scores come from a deterministic stand-in, not the real models.

3–10 words. be yourself. or don't.

interrogating the models… #

token by token. they can't hide their logprobs.

you are clanker

one square per word · green = human · red = clanker

deeper stats #

method: each word you typed is scored by its surprisal under each model — −log pmodel(word), from the model's top-20 next-token probabilities conditioned on your text so far. mean surprisal in nats over your words is how predictable you were; low = clanker. words outside the top-20 are floored, scores are normalized against each model's self-baseline, and your overall is your nearest (least-surprised) model. (equivalently: the KL from your one-hot word choice to the model's distribution collapses to exactly this surprisal.) (demo mode: logprobs are currently simulated.)

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