I’d be worried about getting sucked into semantics here. I think it’s reasonable to say that it passes the original turing test, described by Turing in 1950:
I believe that in about fifty years’ time it will be possible to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 109, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 percent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning. … I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.
I think given the restrictions of an “average interrogator” and “five minutes of questioning”, this prediction has been achieved, albeit a quarter of a century later than he predicted. This obviously doesn’t prove that the AI can think or substitute for complex business tasks (it can’t), but it does have implications for things like AI-spambots.
Thanks for sharing the original definition! I didn’t realise Turing had defined the parameters so precisely, and that they weren’t actually that strict! I
I probably need to stop saying that AI hasn’t passed the Turing test yet then. I guess it has! You’re right that this ends up being an argument over semantics, but seems fair to let Alan Turing define what the term ‘Turing Test’ should mean.
But I do think that the stricter form of the Turing test defined in that metaculus forecast is still a really useful metric for deciding when AGI has been achieved, whereas this much weaker Turing test probably isn’t.
(Also, for what it’s worth, the business tasks I have in mind here aren’t really ‘complex’, they are the kind of tasks that an average human could quite easily do well on within a 5-minute window, possibly as part of a Turing-test style setup, but LLMs struggle with)
I’d be worried about getting sucked into semantics here. I think it’s reasonable to say that it passes the original turing test, described by Turing in 1950:
I think given the restrictions of an “average interrogator” and “five minutes of questioning”, this prediction has been achieved, albeit a quarter of a century later than he predicted. This obviously doesn’t prove that the AI can think or substitute for complex business tasks (it can’t), but it does have implications for things like AI-spambots.
Thanks for sharing the original definition! I didn’t realise Turing had defined the parameters so precisely, and that they weren’t actually that strict! I
I probably need to stop saying that AI hasn’t passed the Turing test yet then. I guess it has! You’re right that this ends up being an argument over semantics, but seems fair to let Alan Turing define what the term ‘Turing Test’ should mean.
But I do think that the stricter form of the Turing test defined in that metaculus forecast is still a really useful metric for deciding when AGI has been achieved, whereas this much weaker Turing test probably isn’t.
(Also, for what it’s worth, the business tasks I have in mind here aren’t really ‘complex’, they are the kind of tasks that an average human could quite easily do well on within a 5-minute window, possibly as part of a Turing-test style setup, but LLMs struggle with)
By that definition, ELIZA would have passed the Turing test in 1966
Show me a 1966 study showing 70% of a representative sample of the general population mistake ELIZA for an human after 5 minutes of conversation.