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ianjbutler • yesterday at 7:24 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

Sigh, the whole "obviously the turing test is solved" meme is annoying.

Like, if we meant that it convincingly masquerades as a shitposter, ok. But everyone still bitches about AI slop, and everyone knows the writing is still bad. How does that even work if the turing test is obviously solved?

More to the point though, if you grill SOTA models on counterfactuals, causal world-models etc, you'll trip them up in a way that actually will not work on ESL students and children. Certainly there's no way to find a person that struggles with that and is also capable of cheerful fluent erudite discussion about astrophysics with perfect grammar. Yes, it's getting harder obviously.. but detecting machines with determined, focused and intelligent interrogation remains pretty easy. If nothing else, the models are cooperative where people wouldn't be and that's a signal too.

The best progress we've made is that most people do agree that this doesn't practically matter very much, i.e. we generally recognize the stakes were always overstated. But the constant vague appeals to common-sense that "of course it's a solved problem!" always feels naive or fake.


Replies

johnsmith1840 • yesterday at 11:28 PM

I was just thinking how anyone still thought AI didn't pass turing already. There's been literal papers proving average people cannot tell reliably.

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ex-aws-dude • today at 12:09 AM

Well the whole lesson learned was that the Turing Test as it was defined was way too easy, it was a bad criteria for GI because it underestimates how easily humans find meaning/patterns in things.

I mean you could show people random markov chain gibberish in 1996 and they would swear they found intelligent meaning in it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markovian_Parallax_Denigrate