My fellow journalists, I need you to stop talking about the Turing Test; it was never a good metric. Turing was a computer scientist, not a psychologist. ELIZA passed it, and also was a decent Person-centered therapy bot. Some people actually used it that way, even knowing it was a bot.
A) There are many paths to the top of a mountain, and
B) LLMs and other AIs aren't real girls and boys just because we feel they are.
If you read Turing's paper, and think about it, you would realize two things.
One: What everyone thinks the Turing Test is has nothing to do with what Turing proposed
Two: Turing's test was actually subtle: it asks the computer to be empathetic enough with human men and woman to be able to perform as the man in a game where a man is trying to persuade someone he's a woman.
Turing was one of the smartest blokes of the 20th century, unlike our illiterate 21st century AI bros.
By the way, I got into what could have been an ugly fight with Daniel Dennett. He said something stupid (in a reply on a random blog) about the Turing Test being about fooling people and I called him on it, referencing a Yale AI Lab paper by Roger Schank.
Dennett claimed that he was the one who told Roger that idea.
What I didn't say was "Sheesh. If you know what the Turing Test is actually about, why the hell did you say something so dead wrong?"
But I sure thought it.
Being slow, I only recently started to figure that out. We (cog. sci. end of AI) were short of friends back in the day and were guilty of grasping at straws.
I've been reading a bit of Jerry Fodor recently, and he's serious fun. Lots of snark and it's good brain excercise for philosophy tech terms.
Yep. I have some horror stories from back in the day.
The place: An AI conference.
The speaker: A woman. Ms. S.
The time: The Q&A session.
Q: I'm not really happy with this approach. Do you know the paper by Ms. B?
Ms. S: Yes, but this work improves on that.
Q: No it doesn't. You clearly don't understand that paper. Ms. B. really got it .
Ms. S.: I assure you, I'm well aware of that paper.
Q: No, you clearly don't understand it.
Ms. S: I understand that paper just fine. I wrote it.
"we just shouldn't have taken it so seriously. "
But my point is very few people took it seriously. Pretty much everyone who comments on the test hasn't read the paper, or didn't read it carefully.
Again: it's not about the computer fooling people, it's about how well the computer plays the role of a man pretending to be a woman.
It may not be a good test, but since we've gone off on a stupid tangent, we haven't thought about the actual idea and don't know if it works/helps.
Quinn Norton
David, a Bostonian in Tokyo.