No, A âSupercomputerâ Did NOT Pass The Turing Test For The First Time And Everyone Should Know Better
Oh, and the biggest red flag of all. The event was organized by Kevin Warwick at Reading University. If youâve spent any time at all in the tech world, you should automatically have red flags raised around that name. Warwick is somewhat infamous for his ridiculous claims to the press, which gullible reporters repeat without question. Heâs been doing it for decades. All the way back in 2000, we were writing about all the ridiculous press he got for claiming to be the worldâs first âcyborgâ for implanting a chip in his arm. There was even a â since taken down â Kevin Warwick Watch website that mocked and categorized all of his media appearances in which gullible reporters simply repeated all of his nutty claims. Warwick had gone quiet for a while, but back in 2010, we wrote about how his lab was getting bogus press for claiming to have âthe first human infected with a computer virus.â The Register has rightly referred to Warwick as both âCaptain Cyborgâ and a âmedia strumpetâ and has long been chronicling his escapades in exaggerating bogus stories about the intersection of humans and computers for many, many years.
Take everything associated with Kevin Warwick with a pinch of salt (Hi Kevin!).
Iâm sure Iâve heard of software âpassingâ the Turing Test before, and Iâm not convinced that creating a decent chatbot really has all that much to do with AI.
Cool software, though.
so you could think of this as kind of a cheat,
Or you could think of it as an actual cheat. New headline:
Publicity Hound Creates Fake Turing Test - Fools a Couple of Celebrities.
The transcripts I found in a couple articles today were unimpressive at best.
Cory, your link to the bot appears to be broken. This one works: http://default-environment-sdqm3mrmp4.elasticbeanstalk.com/
I tried using it and I seem to have angered it. I was being very polite but it misunderstood what I said and got super agressive about it. And when I said stuff that was like an acknowledgement or like âhuh?â if what he said didnât make sense he couldnât figure it out and spat out random stuff, some of which was hostile. He also couldnât respond properly if I responded to a question with an answer that had more than one emotion in it, like âI like my job but dealing with clients is a pain in the ass.â
So, all in all I think heâs got a ways to be able to parse human communications properly.
Thanks for the fixed link. It reminded me of âRacterâ, in that it quoted back my own input and used evasion and misdirection. Not much progress for forty years.
I just chatted with it. Not a chance that it fooled anyone. Repetitive and, as blendergasket said, it gets quite aggressive.
On the other hand, it would perhaps make a good (typical, at least) BB poster :).
Thatâs a kind way of putting it. It seems to me that the human was going out of their way to avoid unmasking the chatbot as a chatbot. Softball questions, ignoring obvious chatbot responses, etc. Iâm not sure if they were deliberately throwing the test or just werenât serious about it, as it wasnât even a particularly good or convincing chatbot and shouldnât have fooled anyone.
Not to mention, deliberately creating impediments to communication goes against the point of the Turing test, which is about what you learn from communicating with someone(something). If you canât communicate, you canât tell if theyâre intelligent. This was âcheatingâ the test in the sense that it was designed to distract people from noticing it was engaging in the test in the first place.
This is how one of the judges (Robert Llewellyn, of Red Dwarf), saw it. I think the online version is an old one?
The aggressiveness seems to be a means of distracting people from the fact that it canât parse what you said, in the hopes that youâll be so thrown off that you wonât notice. It doesnât seem to have a coherent response to almost anything I write.
I tried it out a day or two ago, and NONE of my questions were answered in a way that suggested anything other than a computer program. Itâs actually easier to figure out human-vs-machine with a pretend 13-year-old boy simulation. I know they thought it would make any errors seem like immaturity instead of AI, but as a parent I had no trouble asking questions which were clearly not being answered by an actual 13-year-old. Things like: âwhatâs your favorite car?â returned an answer that said something like âthere are many cars hereâ. Yeah, no.
Maybe it works for testers who have never spent time around 13-year-olds.
Youâre right, but the Turing Test itself doesnât have much to do with AI either, and everything to do with chatbots. (I guess thatâs your point - how the test doesnât test for thinking, it tests for human experience and human psychology). Regardless of how intelligent a computer is, it doesnât have lips, so it canât experience a first kiss (or anything else), so itâs easy to distinguish from human - it can never pass the test unless it takes human descriptions of human experiences and fobs them off as its own. In other words, a machine canât pass the test unless itâs a chatbot.
Ian Bogost wrote an interesting piece about Turing and what the Turing Test means.
I think the test is more interesting as a philosophical exercise in what âintelligenceâ actually means than actually as a real test.
Yeah, I donât think much of the Turing Test. I think it was a thought exercise more than anything.
Itâs kind of like using the Bechdel Test as a measure of feminism.
To be fair, real people do that too.
I really wish this wasnât on BoingBoing.
No, it didnât âpass the Turing Testâ. Itâs a really, really crappy chatbot that wouldnât fool anyone, but the creators knew that, and told the judges to evaluate it on the basis of it being a 13-year old Ukranian child with a poor command of English.
Give it a try. Itâll ask you again and again what you do for a living.
A lot of news orgs are all excited to announce that a âcomputer just passed the Turing Test and fooled judges into thinking itâs a human, and thatâs a huge milestone in AI, etc etcâ, but I guarantee that Skynet/Weyland-Yutani doesnât start with a barely coherent fake Ukranian teenager.
Infinite monkey redux: the more often the test is held the higher likelihood you end up with a judge who is a monkey.
No, not so much. I would reference Paul Myers take on this:
Extremely disappointing that a SF author and technologist would be taken in by such a transparent sham. I donât expect any better from the Daily Mail but câmon Cory, this is embarrassing. What this chatbot did was exceedingly mediocre and wouldnât fool anyone actually trying to probe it seriously. Unlike other posters I believe the Turing test is meaningfulâif I can have an open-ended, free-wheeling conversation with a software program where I can try to unmask it for as long as I want, but fail to, then that is actually impressive. This, on the other handâŚ
