These questions test both specific knowledge of aspects of culture, and basic facts about the meaning of various words and concepts.
According to McKinstry, a program able to do much better than chance on a large number of MIST questions would be judged to have some level of intelligence and understanding.
McKinstry criticized existing approaches to artificial intelligence such as chatterbots, saying that his questions could "kill" AI programs by quickly exposing their weaknesses.
of the MIST have noted that it would be easy to "kill" a McKinstry-style AI too, due to the impossibility of supplying it with correct answers to all possible yes/no questions by ways of a finite set of human-generated Mindpixels: the fact that an AI can answer the question "Is the sun bigger than my foot?"
According to this argument, a human's judgment of a Turing test is vulnerable to the ELIZA effect, a tendency to mistake superficial signs of intelligence for the real thing, anthropomorphizing the program.