The Turing test was also never meant to be taken so seriously. It's not a rigorous statement of anything.

Situations like this are precisely why academics tend to avoid the spotlight. You say one slightly off thing and your perceived authority echoes forever with the intellectually lazy.

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sethev 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, the Turing test has been misunderstood for a long time. Turing published it, though - it wasn't some offhand comment he made and it wasn't intellectually lazy.

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sublinear 17 hours ago | parent [-]

Oh, I didn't say Turing was intellectually lazy. :-)

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sethev 17 hours ago | parent [-]

Fair - yes, it is ironic that his point was closer to "we can't possibly know/define whether a machine is intelligent" but somehow it got turned into "Turing's test will tell us when machines are intelligent".

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bonoboTP 17 hours ago | parent [-]

Turing's whole point was to show that it's an uninteresting question of definitions whether a machine can "think", like whether submarines can "swim" and airplanes can "fly". The only important part are observed outcomes and capabilities.

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sublinear 16 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, but just because language fails to make a distinction doesn't mean there isn't one.

> The only important part are observed outcomes and capabilities.

That's wishful thinking. Not even an engineer would say that. The stability of a state is just as important as achieving it. This is trivially and more intuitively demonstrated with other more down-to-earth identity statements such as "I'm a billionaire" and "the building is standing".

I think we can confidently say LLMs probabilistically achieve a perceived state that is remarkably similar to intelligence, but crumbles upon inspection and seeing it "in motion" so to speak. The same happens to AI-generated images.

I'm not sure why this sparks so much debate every time. If we're looking for a fountain of "realism", you're not going to beat reality and nature itself. All else will eventually have tells that they are not real.

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bonoboTP 16 hours ago | parent [-]

It may be of interest to philosophers, but it has little impact on economic job replacement and how people will earn their living and all the downstream upheaval from that. At some point maybe philosophers will find AI-generated philosophical musings about the nature of AI to be better than what comes from their peers (if blinded).

It also has little impact on the dangerous use cases.

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sublinear 16 hours ago | parent [-]

I think it matters a great deal that LLMs and other "AI" technology are stable within a tolerance that's acceptable.

You're jumping the gun talking about "job replacement". We have not thought about it enough from that engineering angle. It's still very early days. That engineering is going to require people. :-)

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bonoboTP 14 hours ago | parent [-]

Stability is certainly something you can investigate from behavior.

	▲	sublinear 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, and I suppose you believe the AI does this circularly? Perpetual motion with extra steps?

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NitpickLawyer 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> The Turing test was also never meant to be taken so seriously.

citation needed. It has been used as a rubicon for a long time. Ever since Eliza, at least. And there were big headlines and lots of talk around the time LMs became "good enough". I specifically remember when someone had a test done around "a teenager talking in a different language" or somesuch, claiming it was the first time the test was passed.

It is pretty normal that once it was unquestionably "passed", lots of people started claiming it wasn't even that big of a deal. Tesler's theorem and all that.

And even if you think the specific formulation of Turing isn't that important (and I'd somewhat agree), you can still use the concept to look at other things. Imagine asking a mathematician 5 years ago the chances of a Erdos problem being solved by a computer end to end. Or a millennium prize. Or ask a swe if a repo could be generated by a computer from the input "write a mario style game", or any other examples of proven expertise.

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sublinear 16 hours ago | parent [-]

> citation needed

Yes, if you insist on appeals to authority. Authority is a social construct and irrelevant to science.

Thank you for proving my point.

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sethev 15 hours ago | parent [-]

I think the onus is on you to explain why Turing would publish something he didn’t intend people to take seriously. It seems like an odd claim. Perhaps you mean he didn’t intend it to be interpreted the way it was in popular culture?

	▲	sublinear 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Turing was compelled to address an ongoing debate similar to the same one we're having right now. It continues to do its job as a thought experiment. It's meant to be taken about as seriously as we are right now. You either get it, or you don't. Whether machines think is a silly question that deserves its non-answer. We're at the end of what there is to explain, but it was good exposition for the reader. https://www.csee.umbc.edu/courses/471/papers/turing.pdf Literally the very first opening sentences. > I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms "machine" and "think." The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous, If the meaning of the words "machine" and "think" are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, "Can machines think?" is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words."