By Staff Writer – Boonsri Dickinson (@boonspoon)

I’m so nosy! I was at my favorite coffee shop and decided to ask the guy sitting next to me what he was doing. Meet Manuel Rueda, a student at Parsons The New School for Design. He was tinkering with video footage of his head and it looked odd — only the shape of his face appeared on the computer screen. Rueda told me his elaborate plans to compete for the Loebner Prize for artificial intelligence (also known as the first formal Turing Test). In order to win the Grand Prize money of $100,000, a person would have to create a computer that could think. Ultimately, the intelligent machine would have to trick us into thinking we were responding to a human, when we are talking to it.

Rueda’s main focus is on designing the face of the artificial intelligence creature — which is important, if the goal is to make the machine look more human-like. So naturally, he started with his own face. At first, he put a shirt over his head and then covered the computer with it — that way, the web cam only captured the image of his face and not his hair or neck. But after many shirts trials, he enlisted the help of a computer software that would isolate the image of his head more precisely.

In the video above, he placed the image on a computer. The “face” blurted out insulting comments to people who walked by. “I wanted to see how people would react if a machine insulted them,” says Rueda. Like he suspected, his “rude” machine didn’t really insult anyone. Honestly, I can’t imagine anyone getting mad at this robot. If anything, maybe next time people will at least acknowledge the machine’s existence.