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> you could simply chop away everything except the most basic linguistic functions and claim you are a non-native preteen [...] You're 5 years old - and simply

by Ukv 2y ago

> you could simply chop away everything except the most basic linguistic functions and claim you are a non-native preteen [...] You're 5 years old - and simply respond by randomly pounding various keys on the keyboard on occasion. Boom - didn't see that coming, now did ya Turing? Then the real human B would, on average, offer far more compelling evidence of personhood and the bot would fail the majority of the time. I don't see how this issue affects Turing's proposed version of the experiment. > The issue is doing exactly what you're doing here and creating worthless goalposts to begin with Claims from skeptics that "machines fundamentally cannot do X without real intelligence" are relatively easy to come by even now, which creates goalposts for intelligence by contrapositive (¬I => ¬X, so X => I). For me Turing's test is interesting because fully solving it implies achieving all (or at least, a very large class of) observable "X"s to the degree that current humans are capable of. If playing chess truly required intelligence, you could feed in chess moves and a machine that cannot play chess would (over a large enough experiment, so you get people who can and cannot play chess) offer less evidence than the average person. I believe the overall impact is a push towards either "something can behave exactly like it is intelligent without being intelligent" or "machines can be intelligent". Both are interesting and I feel increasingly common viewpoints. > Because it's too hard? Well obviously - that's why it's a goal, and not next month's scrimmage point! Because the goal should be meaningful - "find the factors of this absurdly large coprime" doesn't really say all that much about intelligence, and many other tests would only cover one particular idea of what intelligence is.

somenameforme 2y ago
But I think you're running into some cognitive dissonance here, because in your argument here you're not talking about a "more compelling evidence of personhood", but rather discriminating towards some specific identity. A preteen non-native speaker is just as much a person, with just as much personhood, as our earlier example of a nuclear physicist with a twin neurologist. The only difference is that imitating a preteen non-native speaker is quite trivial and says very little, which is why you would obviously never select such as the identity. In other words your version of the test doesn't involve solving many "X"s at all. In fact it only requires one - the one which simplifies the domain so much as possible. And as you're strongly implying, but not acknowledging, this was not a meaningful achievement at all.
- Ukv 2y ago
  > in your argument here you're not talking about a "more compelling evidence of personhood", but rather discriminating towards some specific identity. A preteen non-native speaker is just as much a person, with just as much personhood It's not about how much of a person they are, but how much evidence of personhood responding in a particular way gives. If you were the interrogator and gave some challenge you think only humans can solve, and got back one "asdfghjkl" (no real evidence either way) and one correct answer (evidence in favor of personhood), your beliefs should be adjusted towards believing the latter is the human. Always giving bad answers just because humans can also give a bad answer is already a failing strategy with low success rate when the test is carried out as Turing specified, with no requirement to imitate a specific characteristic added in. As an analogy that may or may not help: You have two boxes, one containing a rabbit and one containing a turtle. One box is perfectly still, offering little evidence either way (rabbits and turtles can both trivially stay still). The other box is bouncing up and down (something you have reason to believe is difficult for turtles). Which box more likely contains the rabbit? > In other words your version of the test doesn't involve solving many "X"s at all. In fact it only requires one - the one which simplifies the domain so much as possible. I think the key you are missing is that it is up against a real human. It does not just have to pass the "well both humans and bots could theoretically respond in this way" mark by giving gibberish answers, but instead get chosen as human when the second player is likely satisfying many of the interrogator's tests.
  - somenameforme 2y ago
    Your analogy inadvertently once again emphasizes the point. Now change it from being a rabbit and a turtle, to an unknown animal and some non-animal thing pretending to be another unknown animal. And you have to guess which is which. It would be effectively impossible to figure anything out, because you have absolutely no basis to work from. LLMs are trained on nothing except the corpus of human knowledge. It is literally impossible for them to e.g. accidentally say something that it's inconceivable for a human to say, if we have absolutely no way of constraining the identity of said human. And another way these tests are made easier is by generally having all participants manually type out their interactions, instead of having them transcribed. So the dozens of interactions you'd normally have in 5 minutes goes down to ~5. Making all of this that much more true. It's just silly. And no, always giving bad answers it not a failing strategy. As I mentioned, the scenario I'm describing is not a hypothetical. The Turing Test (or at least yet another abysmal bastardization of it) was passed in 2014, with the chatbot in question impersonating a 13 year old Ukrainian teen who was not good in English, or maintaining a coherent dialogue, or train of thought, or even being coherent for the most part. I'm sure this is exactly what Turing had in mind. [1] [1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27762088 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27762088

by Ukv 2y ago

somenameforme 2y ago

But I think you're running into some cognitive dissonance here, because in your argument here you're not talking about a "more compelling evidence of personhood", but rather discriminating towards some specific identity. A preteen non-native speaker is just as much a person, with just as much personhood, as our earlier example of a nuclear physicist with a twin neurologist. The only difference is that imitating a preteen non-native speaker is quite trivial and says very little, which is why you would obviously never select such as the identity. In other words your version of the test doesn't involve solving many "X"s at all. In fact it only requires one - the one which simplifies the domain so much as possible. And as you're strongly implying, but not acknowledging, this was not a meaningful achievement at all.

Ukv 2y ago
> in your argument here you're not talking about a "more compelling evidence of personhood", but rather discriminating towards some specific identity. A preteen non-native speaker is just as much a person, with just as much personhood It's not about how much of a person they are, but how much evidence of personhood responding in a particular way gives. If you were the interrogator and gave some challenge you think only humans can solve, and got back one "asdfghjkl" (no real evidence either way) and one correct answer (evidence in favor of personhood), your beliefs should be adjusted towards believing the latter is the human. Always giving bad answers just because humans can also give a bad answer is already a failing strategy with low success rate when the test is carried out as Turing specified, with no requirement to imitate a specific characteristic added in. As an analogy that may or may not help: You have two boxes, one containing a rabbit and one containing a turtle. One box is perfectly still, offering little evidence either way (rabbits and turtles can both trivially stay still). The other box is bouncing up and down (something you have reason to believe is difficult for turtles). Which box more likely contains the rabbit? > In other words your version of the test doesn't involve solving many "X"s at all. In fact it only requires one - the one which simplifies the domain so much as possible. I think the key you are missing is that it is up against a real human. It does not just have to pass the "well both humans and bots could theoretically respond in this way" mark by giving gibberish answers, but instead get chosen as human when the second player is likely satisfying many of the interrogator's tests.
- somenameforme 2y ago
  Your analogy inadvertently once again emphasizes the point. Now change it from being a rabbit and a turtle, to an unknown animal and some non-animal thing pretending to be another unknown animal. And you have to guess which is which. It would be effectively impossible to figure anything out, because you have absolutely no basis to work from. LLMs are trained on nothing except the corpus of human knowledge. It is literally impossible for them to e.g. accidentally say something that it's inconceivable for a human to say, if we have absolutely no way of constraining the identity of said human. And another way these tests are made easier is by generally having all participants manually type out their interactions, instead of having them transcribed. So the dozens of interactions you'd normally have in 5 minutes goes down to ~5. Making all of this that much more true. It's just silly. And no, always giving bad answers it not a failing strategy. As I mentioned, the scenario I'm describing is not a hypothetical. The Turing Test (or at least yet another abysmal bastardization of it) was passed in 2014, with the chatbot in question impersonating a 13 year old Ukrainian teen who was not good in English, or maintaining a coherent dialogue, or train of thought, or even being coherent for the most part. I'm sure this is exactly what Turing had in mind. [1] [1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27762088 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27762088