Turing test isn’t actually meant to be a scientific or accurate test. It was proposed as a mental exercise to demonstrate a philosophical argument. Mainly the support for machine input-output paradigm and the blackbox construct. It wasn’t meant to say anything about humans either. To make this kind of experiments without any sort of self-awareness is just proof that epistemology is a weak topic in computer science academy.
Specially when, from psychology, we know that there’s so much more complexity riding on such tests. Just to name one example, we know expectations alter perception. A Turing test suffers from a loaded question problem. If you prompt a person telling them they’ll talk with a human, with a computer program or announce before hand they’ll have to decide whether they’re talking with a human or not, and all possible combinations, you’ll get different results each time.
Your first two paragraphs seem to rail against a philosophical conclusion made by the authors by virtue of carrying out the Turing test. Something like “this is evidence of machine consciousness” for example. I don’t really get the impression that any such claim was made, or that more education in epistemology would have changed anything.
In a world where GPT4 exists, the question of whether one person can be fooled by one chatbot in one conversation is long since uninteresting. The question of whether specific models can achieve statistically significant success is maybe a bit more compelling, not because it’s some kind of breakthrough but because it makes a generalized claim.
Re: your edit, Turing explicitly puts forth the imitation game scenario as a practicable proxy for the question of machine intelligence, “can machines think?”. He directly argues that this scenario is indeed a reasonable proxy for that question. His argument, as he admits, is not a strongly held conviction or rigorous argument, but “recitations tending to produce belief,” insofar as they are hard to rebut, or their rebuttals tend to be flawed. The whole paper was to poke at the apparent differences between (a futuristic) machine intelligence and human intelligence. In this way, the Turing test is indeed a measure of intelligence. It’s not to say that a machine passing the test is somehow in possession of a human-like mind or has reached a significant milestone of intelligence.
Turing never said anything of the sort, “this is a test for intelligence”. Intelligence and thinking are not the same. Humans have plenty of unintelligent behaviors, that has no bearing on their ability to think. And plenty of animals display intelligent behavior but that is not evidence of their ability to think. Really, if you know nothing about epistemology, just shut up, nobody likes your stupid LLMs and the marketing is tiring already, and the copyright infringement and rampant privacy violations and property theft and insatiable power hunger are not worthy.
Turing test isn’t actually meant to be a scientific or accurate test. It was proposed as a mental exercise to demonstrate a philosophical argument. Mainly the support for machine input-output paradigm and the blackbox construct. It wasn’t meant to say anything about humans either. To make this kind of experiments without any sort of self-awareness is just proof that epistemology is a weak topic in computer science academy.
Specially when, from psychology, we know that there’s so much more complexity riding on such tests. Just to name one example, we know expectations alter perception. A Turing test suffers from a loaded question problem. If you prompt a person telling them they’ll talk with a human, with a computer program or announce before hand they’ll have to decide whether they’re talking with a human or not, and all possible combinations, you’ll get different results each time.
Your first two paragraphs seem to rail against a philosophical conclusion made by the authors by virtue of carrying out the Turing test. Something like “this is evidence of machine consciousness” for example. I don’t really get the impression that any such claim was made, or that more education in epistemology would have changed anything.
In a world where GPT4 exists, the question of whether one person can be fooled by one chatbot in one conversation is long since uninteresting. The question of whether specific models can achieve statistically significant success is maybe a bit more compelling, not because it’s some kind of breakthrough but because it makes a generalized claim.
Re: your edit, Turing explicitly puts forth the imitation game scenario as a practicable proxy for the question of machine intelligence, “can machines think?”. He directly argues that this scenario is indeed a reasonable proxy for that question. His argument, as he admits, is not a strongly held conviction or rigorous argument, but “recitations tending to produce belief,” insofar as they are hard to rebut, or their rebuttals tend to be flawed. The whole paper was to poke at the apparent differences between (a futuristic) machine intelligence and human intelligence. In this way, the Turing test is indeed a measure of intelligence. It’s not to say that a machine passing the test is somehow in possession of a human-like mind or has reached a significant milestone of intelligence.
https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238
Turing never said anything of the sort, “this is a test for intelligence”. Intelligence and thinking are not the same. Humans have plenty of unintelligent behaviors, that has no bearing on their ability to think. And plenty of animals display intelligent behavior but that is not evidence of their ability to think. Really, if you know nothing about epistemology, just shut up, nobody likes your stupid LLMs and the marketing is tiring already, and the copyright infringement and rampant privacy violations and property theft and insatiable power hunger are not worthy.
U good?