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.
"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.