Proof of AGI?
Most people know that the famous Turing Test, a thought experiment conceived by computer pioneer Alan Turing, is a popular measure of progress in artificial intelligence. Many mistakenly assume, however, that it is proof that machines are actually thinking.
How The Turing Test works
The Turing Test was classically conceived by Turing as a round of passing text messages between a human "judge" and two "witnesses," one a human and one a computer. The computer and human witnesses were charged with convincing the human judge that they were human by the messages each sent. The judge knows only one of the two is human, but not which is which, and has to guess.
The results
Three other AI programs were tested: OpenAI’s previous model, GPT-4o; Meta Platforms’s Llama 3.1 405b; and a very ancient chat bot program from the 1960s, called ELIZA. ELIZA was included because, as a more primitive program, it could act as a check on whether the large language models fooled a human simply by random chance or because they were actually better programs.
Is the test actually a measure of intelligence?
So, you might ask what it means that humans do a poor job of telling a computer and a person apart based on chat messages. The "most controversial question" about Turing’s problem over the decades is whether it is actually measuring intelligence, Jones and Bergen acknowledge.
Sociability, not intelligence
All this means humans were picking up on things such as sociability rather than intelligence, leading Jones and Bergen to conclude that "Fundamentally, the Turing test is not a direct test of intelligence, but a test of humanlikeness."
Conclusion
In fact, they suggest the test could come out very different with different designs. Experts in AI, they note, could be tested as a judge cohort. They might judge differently than lay people because they have different expectations of a machine.
FAQs
Q: What is the Turing Test?
A: The Turing Test is a thought experiment conceived by computer pioneer Alan Turing that measures the ability of a machine to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human.
Q: What is the purpose of the Turing Test?
A: The purpose of the Turing Test is to assess the progress of artificial intelligence and to determine whether a machine is able to think and behave like a human.
Q: How does the Turing Test work?
A: In the Turing Test, a human "judge" engages in a text-based conversation with two entities, one human and one machine. The judge must then determine which entity is human and which is machine.
Q: What are the implications of the Turing Test?
A: The implications of the Turing Test are that it is not a direct test of intelligence, but rather a test of humanlikeness. It suggests that machines have become so good at mimicking human behavior that it is difficult to distinguish them from humans.
