Comment by codeulike

18 hours ago

Turing test was definitely and conclusively refuted in the 1960s

Are you sure?

Understood properly, Turings Imitation game aka the turing test, should be adversarial. That is, the player should be asking hard questions to try and discover who is who, not just having an idle chat. No chatbot has been able to consistently pass an adversarial Turing Test until the rise of LLMs

The Imitation Game:

https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/activities/ieg/e-library/sources/t_a...

Yeah I dont think a single current LLM would fool me in a turing test - I would obiously use all kinds of prompt injection techniques, ask about 'dangerous' or controversial topics, ask about random niche facts in varied fields, etc.

The fact that LLMs often score as "more human" than actual humans is a downstream consequence of ELIZA tricking people into thinking it had a glimmer of consciousness. The Turing test was refuted because it was proven scientifically meaningless in the 1960s, and LLMs only reinforce that.

  • What refutation are you referring to? Surely you can cite how it was "proven scientifically meaningless" some 6 decades ago.

    • I did with the Weizenbaum link, but here's a specific refutation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

      The Turing Test is totally meaningless, as was conclusively demonstrated some 6 decades ago. It is a test that measures how well your program can fool humans, which means "intelligence of the computer" is hopelessly conflated with "social engineering chops of the humans who programmed the computer." Any computer scientist who takes it seriously should be deeply embarrassed because they are spouting sci-fi adjacent nonsense, not actual science. Actual science involves updating your priors based on evidence.