The Turing Test poisoned the minds of generations of AI enthusiasts, because its criteria is producing text that persuades observers it was written by a human.
The result? Generative AI text products designed to "appear real" rather than produce accurate or ethical outputs.
It *should* be obvious why it's problematic to create a piece of software that excels at persuasion without concern for accuracy, honesty or ethics. But apparently it's not.
@skry @schoolingdiana @intelwire Turing's original paper is about how behavioural testing is useless in determining intelligence. He never said, "use this test to determine if machines are intelligent". He meant the opposite: don't even bother, since you can never know if it is real intelligence or something pretending to be intelligent.
@szakib @skry @schoolingdiana I don't buy this -- he spent a lot of time dealing with potential exceptions (including "but what if ESP"! and more functional ones) to have meant it as a "this shows machine intelligence isn't Real" argument. (cf. his discussion of Lady Lovelace's Objection, and later of Learning Machines.)
I think he rejected the distinction between "real intelligence" and "pretending to be intelligent" -- he argues that that pretending is a task which requires at least as much intelligence, itself.
(*Hot Take voice but like I do actually believe this* This Is Because Turing Was Gay.)
@gaditb @skry @schoolingdiana We certainly agree that he went to great lengths to prove that real and pretend intelligence are indistinguishable from the outside and the famous test is a thought experiment for establishing this.
I am not a Turing/history expert, but to me it seems that he thought that this made the question useless: why ask if machines can be "intelligent" if we cannot actually answer?
(N.B. we still don't have a good definition for "intelligent".)
J.M. Berger
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