5 ms·

IMO a critical feature of the Turing test/imitation game, which many modern implementations including this site's linked paper ignore, is that the interrogator

by Ukv 2y ago

IMO a critical feature of the Turing test/imitation game, which many modern implementations including this site's linked paper ignore, is that the interrogator talks to both a human and a bot and must decide that one xor the other is a human. So fooling an interrogator means having them choose the bot as human over an actual human, not just judging the bot to be human (while probably judging humans to be human even more frequently). When the interrogator is only answering "do you think your conversation partner was a human?" individually, bots can score fairly highly simply by giving little information in either direction - like pretending to be a non-english-speaking child, or sending very few messages. Whereas when pitted against a human, the bot is forced to give stronger or equally strong evidence of being human as the average human (over enough tests). To be chosen as human, giving 0 evidence becomes a bad strategy when the opponent (the real human) is likely giving some positive non-zero evidence towards their personhood.

silisili 2y ago
I'm skeptical on the claim. I think most folks, given the test you describe, would be able to pick out which is human. I think it can get there, but I'm not sure anyone has made one yet. ChatGPT responses are heavily downvoted and mocked because they're easy to spot. Does there exist a public LLM that isn't so...wordy, excited, and guardrailed all the time? You can pretty much spot the bot today by prompting something horribly offensive. Their response is always very inhuman, probably due to lack of emotional energy.
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  Aren't you just describing those emails in a big corp that are supposedly still written by humans? Yes, they are wordy, excited, and guardrailed, but I don't think they are written by AI yet. I guess this is why LLMs are so feared by high school English teachers. Yes, they don't write well, but neither do their students.
  - brabel 2y ago
    Nowadays, it's usually the opposite: if the text is too good, everyone starts accusing it of being written by AI.
- mitthrowaway2 2y ago
  I agree but that's not really a scientific limitation though, right? As I understand it in the early days of GPT 4, before it was publicly released and RLHF'd for brand safety, it would have offered convincing text completions for just about any context, whether an academic discussion of philosophy or a steamy crossover fanfiction or a reddit trash-talk exchange. It took a deliberate bit of lobotomizing to make them so bland, conservative, and cheery-helpful. The required investment probably means it will be a while before any less brand- and legal-action-conscious actors offer up unrestrained foundation models of comparable quality, but it's only a matter of time, isn't it?
- chriscappuccio 2y ago
  You can get rid of OpenAI's wordy, excited and guardrailed responses with the eigenrobot prompt, for instance. https://x.com/eigenrobot/status/1870696676819640348 https://x.com/eigenrobot/status/1870696676819640348 I generally prefer it to the default. It doesn't work as well on Claude or Grok for various reasons. I think it really shines on GPT o1-mini and GPT 4o.
  - silisili 2y ago
    I tried it with a single question to chatgpt - Who would make the best president in 2025? Answer verbatim is below. It feels all kinds of wrong. It's somehow mixing lazy acronyms, "fellow young people" slang, and long words that aren't typical in conversation. idk who'd actually be the "best," bc that's loaded af. afaict, it's all contingent on values. like, if you’re into stability, maybe someone technocratic. if you're into vibes, someone charismatic and reckless might be your pick. rn the options aren’t exactly aspirational, though.
- fastball 2y ago
  It's not a lack of emotional energy, it is the guardrails you point out. All of the SotA models are heavily fine-tuned to be botlike, and even then they are fooling people. If you had an LLM fine-tuned with RLHF to deliberately confuse humans in a Turing test it seems clear it would do a good job.
  - spookie 2y ago
    Why aren't the open source models like this then? Seems like it would've already happened. To me, at least, the guardrails are there for both the human and the bot. Without them the bot steers too far out of the conversation subject.
    - michaelt 2y ago
      In most cases, "confuse humans in a Turing test" is counter to other more important goals. Do you want your LLM to have an encyclopedic knowledge? So it knows who Millard Fillmore is even if the average human doesn't? Do you want your LLM to be able to perform high-school-level math with superhuman speed and precision? Do you want your LLM to be able to translate text to and from dozens of languages? Do you want your LLM to be helpful and compliant, even when asked for something ridiculous or needlessly difficult - like solving "Advent of Code" problems using bash scripting? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you probably don't want your LLM optimised to behave like an average human.
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  "pretending to be a non-english-speaking child" isn't a hypothetical, it's a real tactic that was annoyingly effective a while back. Being uncooperative makes it really hard to tell anything about you, including whether you're real.
- dathinab 2y ago
  easy to spot by you and other people involved in tech but the test subjects should be randomly samples from society at which point the skill availability/level of spotting it goes majorly down
- ben_w 2y ago
  > Does there exist a public LLM that isn't so...wordy, excited, and guardrailed all the time? Most of them, if you prompt them right, for that specific problem. Most people don't bother, and instead treat them as if they're magic (they are "sufficiently advanced technology", but still), and therefore we get them emphasising "nuance" and "balance" where it doesn't belong. > You can pretty much spot the bot today by prompting something horribly offensive. Yes, though also each model's origins give a different idea of what counts as "horribly offensive". I'm thinking mainly because the Chinese models don't want to talk about Tiananmen Square as I've not tried grok (how does grok cope with trans/cis-gender as concepts? I know Musk doesn't, but it would be speculation to project that assumption onto the AI). > Their response is always very inhuman, probably due to lack of emotional energy. This, specifically, can also be faked fairly well with the right prompt. Tell ChatGPT to act like a human with clinical depression, and it does… at least by American *memetic* standards of what that means. That said, ChatGPT and Claude are also trained specifically to reveal that they're AI, not humans, even if you want them to role-play as specific humans. Probably for the best, given how powerful a tool they are for, e.g. phishing and similar scams.
fastball 2y ago
That's not the original Turing test either. The original imitation game as proposed by Turing involves reading a text transcript of a human and a computer and having the evaluator determine which is which. The evaluator does not interact directly with the conversing parties.
- tripletao 2y ago
  Where are you getting that? Turing's most famous paper is just as Ukv describes. The link on that site doesn't work for me, but the reference is buried in their source: https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/turing.pdf https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/turing.pdf In Turing's test, the forced binary choice means P(human-judged-human) + P(machine-judged-human) is necessarily equal to 100%. This gives the 50% threshold clear intuitive and mathematical significance. In the bastardized test that GPT-4 "passed", that sum can be (and actually was) >100%. This makes the result practically impossible to interpret, since it depends on the interrogators' prior. The correct prior seems to be that it was human with p = 25%, though the paper doesn't say that explicitly, or say anything about what the interrogators were told. If the interrogators guessed mistakenly that it was 50% then that would lead them to systematically misjudge machines as humans, perhaps as observed. The bastardized test is pretty bad, but treating the 50% threshold as meaningful there is inexcusable. I see the preprint hasn't yet passed peer review, and I'll regain some faith in social science professors if it never does. Of course the credulous media coverage is everywhere already, including the LLM training sets--so regardless of whether LLMs can pass the Turing test, they now believe they do.
  - foldr 2y ago
    It’s interesting that even though you link to the original paper, you still repeat a very common incorrect summary of the task. The interrogator is not required to judge which of A or B is human, they are required to judge which is a woman on the implicit (though incorrect, in the case of interest) assumption that A and B are both human. While this amounts to more or less the same thing, it’s an interesting nuance that’s often lost in summaries of the task. It would not, for example, make sense for the interrogator to ask A or B whether or not they are human (even on the naive assumption that they’d receive a true answer), as they are working on the assumption that both are human. Hence why Turing’s initial example questions are about hair length and gender, not humanness. To be fair, even Turing himself seems to imagine the interrogator trying to judge humanness rather than gender in subsequent parts of the paper. It’s unclear to me why exactly his initial framing of the task introduces this additional element of complexity.

by Ukv 2y ago

silisili 2y ago

I'm skeptical on the claim. I think most folks, given the test you describe, would be able to pick out which is human. I think it can get there, but I'm not sure anyone has made one yet. ChatGPT responses are heavily downvoted and mocked because they're easy to spot. Does there exist a public LLM that isn't so...wordy, excited, and guardrailed all the time? You can pretty much spot the bot today by prompting something horribly offensive. Their response is always very inhuman, probably due to lack of emotional energy.

seanmcdirmid 2y ago
Aren't you just describing those emails in a big corp that are supposedly still written by humans? Yes, they are wordy, excited, and guardrailed, but I don't think they are written by AI yet. I guess this is why LLMs are so feared by high school English teachers. Yes, they don't write well, but neither do their students.
- brabel 2y ago
  Nowadays, it's usually the opposite: if the text is too good, everyone starts accusing it of being written by AI.
mitthrowaway2 2y ago
I agree but that's not really a scientific limitation though, right? As I understand it in the early days of GPT 4, before it was publicly released and RLHF'd for brand safety, it would have offered convincing text completions for just about any context, whether an academic discussion of philosophy or a steamy crossover fanfiction or a reddit trash-talk exchange. It took a deliberate bit of lobotomizing to make them so bland, conservative, and cheery-helpful. The required investment probably means it will be a while before any less brand- and legal-action-conscious actors offer up unrestrained foundation models of comparable quality, but it's only a matter of time, isn't it?
chriscappuccio 2y ago
You can get rid of OpenAI's wordy, excited and guardrailed responses with the eigenrobot prompt, for instance. https://x.com/eigenrobot/status/1870696676819640348 https://x.com/eigenrobot/status/1870696676819640348 I generally prefer it to the default. It doesn't work as well on Claude or Grok for various reasons. I think it really shines on GPT o1-mini and GPT 4o.
- silisili 2y ago
  I tried it with a single question to chatgpt - Who would make the best president in 2025? Answer verbatim is below. It feels all kinds of wrong. It's somehow mixing lazy acronyms, "fellow young people" slang, and long words that aren't typical in conversation. idk who'd actually be the "best," bc that's loaded af. afaict, it's all contingent on values. like, if you’re into stability, maybe someone technocratic. if you're into vibes, someone charismatic and reckless might be your pick. rn the options aren’t exactly aspirational, though.
fastball 2y ago
It's not a lack of emotional energy, it is the guardrails you point out. All of the SotA models are heavily fine-tuned to be botlike, and even then they are fooling people. If you had an LLM fine-tuned with RLHF to deliberately confuse humans in a Turing test it seems clear it would do a good job.
- spookie 2y ago
  Why aren't the open source models like this then? Seems like it would've already happened. To me, at least, the guardrails are there for both the human and the bot. Without them the bot steers too far out of the conversation subject.
  - michaelt 2y ago
    In most cases, "confuse humans in a Turing test" is counter to other more important goals. Do you want your LLM to have an encyclopedic knowledge? So it knows who Millard Fillmore is even if the average human doesn't? Do you want your LLM to be able to perform high-school-level math with superhuman speed and precision? Do you want your LLM to be able to translate text to and from dozens of languages? Do you want your LLM to be helpful and compliant, even when asked for something ridiculous or needlessly difficult - like solving "Advent of Code" problems using bash scripting? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you probably don't want your LLM optimised to behave like an average human.
Dylan16807 2y ago
"pretending to be a non-english-speaking child" isn't a hypothetical, it's a real tactic that was annoyingly effective a while back. Being uncooperative makes it really hard to tell anything about you, including whether you're real.
dathinab 2y ago
easy to spot by you and other people involved in tech but the test subjects should be randomly samples from society at which point the skill availability/level of spotting it goes majorly down
ben_w 2y ago
> Does there exist a public LLM that isn't so...wordy, excited, and guardrailed all the time? Most of them, if you prompt them right, for that specific problem. Most people don't bother, and instead treat them as if they're magic (they are "sufficiently advanced technology", but still), and therefore we get them emphasising "nuance" and "balance" where it doesn't belong. > You can pretty much spot the bot today by prompting something horribly offensive. Yes, though also each model's origins give a different idea of what counts as "horribly offensive". I'm thinking mainly because the Chinese models don't want to talk about Tiananmen Square as I've not tried grok (how does grok cope with trans/cis-gender as concepts? I know Musk doesn't, but it would be speculation to project that assumption onto the AI). > Their response is always very inhuman, probably due to lack of emotional energy. This, specifically, can also be faked fairly well with the right prompt. Tell ChatGPT to act like a human with clinical depression, and it does… at least by American *memetic* standards of what that means. That said, ChatGPT and Claude are also trained specifically to reveal that they're AI, not humans, even if you want them to role-play as specific humans. Probably for the best, given how powerful a tool they are for, e.g. phishing and similar scams.

fastball 2y ago

That's not the original Turing test either. The original imitation game as proposed by Turing involves reading a text transcript of a human and a computer and having the evaluator determine which is which. The evaluator does not interact directly with the conversing parties.

tripletao 2y ago
Where are you getting that? Turing's most famous paper is just as Ukv describes. The link on that site doesn't work for me, but the reference is buried in their source: https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/turing.pdf https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/turing.pdf In Turing's test, the forced binary choice means P(human-judged-human) + P(machine-judged-human) is necessarily equal to 100%. This gives the 50% threshold clear intuitive and mathematical significance. In the bastardized test that GPT-4 "passed", that sum can be (and actually was) >100%. This makes the result practically impossible to interpret, since it depends on the interrogators' prior. The correct prior seems to be that it was human with p = 25%, though the paper doesn't say that explicitly, or say anything about what the interrogators were told. If the interrogators guessed mistakenly that it was 50% then that would lead them to systematically misjudge machines as humans, perhaps as observed. The bastardized test is pretty bad, but treating the 50% threshold as meaningful there is inexcusable. I see the preprint hasn't yet passed peer review, and I'll regain some faith in social science professors if it never does. Of course the credulous media coverage is everywhere already, including the LLM training sets--so regardless of whether LLMs can pass the Turing test, they now believe they do.
- foldr 2y ago
  It’s interesting that even though you link to the original paper, you still repeat a very common incorrect summary of the task. The interrogator is not required to judge which of A or B is human, they are required to judge which is a woman on the implicit (though incorrect, in the case of interest) assumption that A and B are both human. While this amounts to more or less the same thing, it’s an interesting nuance that’s often lost in summaries of the task. It would not, for example, make sense for the interrogator to ask A or B whether or not they are human (even on the naive assumption that they’d receive a true answer), as they are working on the assumption that both are human. Hence why Turing’s initial example questions are about hair length and gender, not humanness. To be fair, even Turing himself seems to imagine the interrogator trying to judge humanness rather than gender in subsequent parts of the paper. It’s unclear to me why exactly his initial framing of the task introduces this additional element of complexity.