There was a time in the not too distant past—say, nine months ago—when the Turing test seemed like a pretty stringent detector of machine intelligence. Chances are you're familiar with how it works: Human judges hold text conversations with two hidden interlocutors, one human and one computer, and try to determine which is which. If the computer manages to fool at least 30 percent of the judges, it passes the test and is pronounced capable of thought. For 70 years, it was hard to imagine how a computer could pass the test without possessing what AI researchers now call artificial general intelligence, the entire range of human intellectual capacities. Then along came large language models such as GPT and Bard, and the Turing test suddenly began seeming strangely outmoded. But it was never merely a pass/fail benchmark. Its creator, Alan Turing, a gay man sentenced in his time to chemical castration, based his test on an ethos of radical inclusivity: The gap between genuine intelligence and a fully convincing imitation of intelligence is only as wide as our own prejudice. When a computer provokes real human responses in us—engaging our intellect, our amazement, our gratitude, our empathy, even our fear—that is more than empty mimicry. A thinker as deep as Turing would not be blind to GPT's limitations. As a victim of profound homophobia, he would probably be alert to the dangers of implicit bias encoded in GPT's training data. It would be apparent to him that despite GPT's astonishing breadth of knowledge, its creativity and critical reasoning skills are on par with a diligent undergraduate's at best. And he would certainly recognize that this undergraduate suffers from severe anterograde amnesia, unable to form new relationships or memories beyond its intensive education. But still: Imagine the scale of Turing's wonder. The computational entity on the laptop in front of him is, in a very real sense, his intellectual child—and ours. Appreciating intelligence in our children as they grow and develop is always, in the end, an act of wonder, and of love. The Actual Alan Turing Test is not a test of AI at all. It is a test of us humans. Are we passing—or failing? |
