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Response by Ray Kurzweil to chatbot Eugene Goostman “passing the Turing test”

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Re: Response by Ray Kurzweil to chatbot Eugene Goostman “passing the Turing test”

#81

Can anyone clarify this for me? > Professor Warwick claims that the test was “unrestricted.” However, having the chatbot claim to be a 13-year-old child, and one for whom English is not a first language, is effectively a restriction. Kurzweil seems to say that the bot lying is a restriction, but the Kapor-Kurzweil Turing Test Session rules explicitly allow the bot to lie about who they are[1]: > Neither the Turing Te…

The funny part is that it actually is 13 years old, and has a Russian/Ukrainian parentage.

Re: Response by Ray Kurzweil to chatbot Eugene Goostman “passing the Turing test”

#82
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Turing never even mentioned the criteria that participants should be aware that they are possibly talking to a computer. What? Here's what he said. It seems pretty clear that this version of the game involves one human interrogator, one human and one computer, and the interrogator has to decide which is human and which isn't. > The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the 'imita…

The specifics of the Turing Test have been debated for decades. It is clear that different versions and interpretations exist, especially now we have moved on from behaviorism that was popular during the time Turing wrote the paper. From your quotes it only says that player A is to be replaced with a machine, not that player C is to be made aware of this replacement. I do agree that that is the popular interpretation…

> Kurzweil's line of questioning is not fair or normal or productive communication even if it was between two humans. A 13- year-old boy would have told Kurzweil to bugger off when tasked to answer 2+2 or wouldn't have responded at all.

That seems to make it a very good way to distinguish humans from bots even if it isn't "fair or normal or productive communication" -- if humans could detect that a line of questioning isn't "fair or normal or productive communication" and cut it off, and the chatbot can't, that would seem to be a manner in which a chatbot is readily distinguishable from a human by way of interaction.

And, I would argue, recognizing abusive, unproductive lines of inquiry and either diverting them early or cutting them off completely is an important part of human communication.

Re: Response by Ray Kurzweil to chatbot Eugene Goostman “passing the Turing test”

#83
I'm pretty sure I'd be able to detect almost any bot that tries to pass a Turing test. They always seem to try to answer every question. What if you did something like this in rapid succession...

Me: hey Me: hola! Me: que pasa? Me: 'sup?

If the bot/person on the other end tried to respond exactly 4 times that would be a very strong indication that something's amiss. And most likely they would trip up on the slang term at the end.

Re: Response by Ray Kurzweil to chatbot Eugene Goostman “passing the Turing test”

#84
post #31

I think most people misunderstand the intent of Turing's paper in which he describes his eponymous test. I agree with Chomsky's reading, which he laid out in "Language & Thought": "There is a great deal of often heated debate about these matters in the literature of the cognitive sciences, artificial intelligence, and philosophy of mind, but it is hard to see that any serious question has been posed. The question of…

>Fooling people into mistaking a submarine for a whale doesn't show that submarines really swim Why not? Presumably part of the act of fooling would involve 'swimming' submarines. I think passing a __strong__ Turing test actually does say something about our brains, cognition, and consciousness. And by a 'strong Turing test', I don't mean dinky 5 minute tests with a "Ukrainian boy". Imagine you carry on a 20 year rel…

There are a few problems with this line of reasoning.

First, that there is an implicit assumption about how cognition and consciousness are defined, but there is no real definition.

Following the example, it's not defined what a duck is, and "philosophers" actually don't try to elevate the question - they try to find answers to it.

While a "strong" test for example would look appealing, the problem is that there is no real model of weakness/strenght, and while a human would pass all the possible models of humanity, a computer would surely pass only the ones it's programmed for.

Another thing is that in order for a computer to truly mimic a human, that is, to fool people for 20 years about movies/music/sports/family/relationships, but also other abstract experiences, the computer would need to experience them, and especially, elaborate them in a human way.

Which is again, very "open", and it's the core problem.

Even excluding the openness problem, the Turing test in the way it's posed, looks to me as the photorealism problem. You can achieve it in a static picture, but once you freely move in a 3D world, you see the flaws that show that what you're experiencing in reality is a limited set of limited algorithms, which are used to workaround hard problems (workaround is the key).

I think exactly the same arguments stand, that is, in order to mimic a human in such a high level of faithfulness, very hard problems would need to be solved, not just worked around.

Re: Response by Ray Kurzweil to chatbot Eugene Goostman “passing the Turing test”

#85

The answers Ray got back are borderline embarrassing. They're designed to deflect the question by ignoring the request and asking another unrelated question or deflecting by humor. These are common ploys in faking AI chat. Hell, what 13 yo calls himself a "little boy?" I was in 8th grade at 13 and looking forward to high school. I can't imagine calling myself a "little boy" at an age when some of my peers were sexual…

It's not crap, it's just a continuum. There are already chatbots that 'pass' sufficiently well to keep lonely people sending them salacious text messages. And presumably when the day comes that the robots are marching on Washington DC to argue for their rights, pretty much everyone will be convinced. For every step in between there will be 'AI's that fool more of the people, more of the time.

Hold on, you may say, we're talking about chatbots progressively fooling people, not 'real' artificial intelligence. But with better chatting comes better functional intelligence. For my bank's chatbot to converse sufficiently well to provide useful customer service requires it to understand all sorts of language and questions. For a personal avatar to take all your messages or make you fall in love with it (like that recent movie) requires even more capability. Whether it can ever transition into fully sapient consciousness verges on philosophy or, at any rate, is a question we can't answer yet.

Re: Response by Ray Kurzweil to chatbot Eugene Goostman “passing the Turing test”

#86

The answers Ray got back are borderline embarrassing. They're designed to deflect the question by ignoring the request and asking another unrelated question or deflecting by humor. These are common ploys in faking AI chat. Hell, what 13 yo calls himself a "little boy?" I was in 8th grade at 13 and looking forward to high school. I can't imagine calling myself a "little boy" at an age when some of my peers were sexual…

Clearly if the criteria for passing the Turing test rests on this 30% of judges "fooled" threshold, we need to add a screen for the judges themselves...

Re: Response by Ray Kurzweil to chatbot Eugene Goostman “passing the Turing test”

#87
As I've written chat bots before this is standard stuff that all bots do:

1. regex the input and spit back canned responses: Question: I live in the |||>|||. Do you know where that is? Eugene: Every nerd knows that the |||>|||.

2. if you get confused spit back out something from the chat history Question I live in the capital of the country that put a man on the moon. Eugene:: Well, if you want it, the |||>||.

3. if you haven't been able to find a regex pattern match in a while try to derail the conversation. Question: How old were you when you started to wear glasses? Eugene: No I was not! How can you think so?! If I’m not mistaken – |||>||. OR it’s a secret?:-)

In fact this bot is pretty bad. You can tell from the output that it couldn't pattern match virtually any of the inputs and responses 3,7-10 are an attempt to change the topic of the conversation. Responses 4,5 are pattern match misses that are regurgitating from the chat history. Only 1,2,4 are response matches from the parsing engine.

Re: Response by Ray Kurzweil to chatbot Eugene Goostman “passing the Turing test”

#88
post #85

The answers Ray got back are borderline embarrassing. They're designed to deflect the question by ignoring the request and asking another unrelated question or deflecting by humor. These are common ploys in faking AI chat. Hell, what 13 yo calls himself a "little boy?" I was in 8th grade at 13 and looking forward to high school. I can't imagine calling myself a "little boy" at an age when some of my peers were sexual…

It's not crap, it's just a continuum. There are already chatbots that 'pass' sufficiently well to keep lonely people sending them salacious text messages. And presumably when the day comes that the robots are marching on Washington DC to argue for their rights, pretty much everyone will be convinced. For every step in between there will be 'AI's that fool more of the people, more of the time. Hold on, you may say, we…

The only aspect where this chatbot seems better than ELIZA is that it can query the internet for state capitals. That's 50 years of a complete lack of advancement.

Re: Response by Ray Kurzweil to chatbot Eugene Goostman “passing the Turing test”

#89
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen better in the 90's.

ELIZA comes from the top of my head, and did impress me at that time ( '94 ? ). Lately I found out it had a psychologist side in it, as per original design and the answering with a question. Better? Maybe, maybe not. But after 20 years, to show no real progress at all? Baffling.

ELIZA is from 1966.

Re: Response by Ray Kurzweil to chatbot Eugene Goostman “passing the Turing test”

#90
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Fooling people into mistaking a submarine for a whale doesn't show that submarines really swim Why not? Presumably part of the act of fooling would involve 'swimming' submarines. I think passing a __strong__ Turing test actually does say something about our brains, cognition, and consciousness. And by a 'strong Turing test', I don't mean dinky 5 minute tests with a "Ukrainian boy". Imagine you carry on a 20 year rel…

I think we agree. And I think Turing's point in choosing a conversation as the test was to pick something that would indicate the vast range of human experience. If a computer could pass a strong version of the test as you describe, then I would agree that we would have say, as you do, "if it looks like a duck, .... then it is a duck." But I don't agree that it renders the concept of conciousness meaningless (or at l…

I'm not so sure that just because you can fool me that an object is a duck, that it is a duck. At least when applied to general AI. Nor do I necessarily agree that just because I can have a conversation with an algorithm, that we should give that algorithm all the rights given to humans.

For example, if I say mean things to that algorithm, even one that can fool me into thinking it's another human for decades, is that morally wrong? Even if it's just setting some variable in memory to sad=true? If so, is it morally wrong for me to create a program consisting only of a singular red button, that when pushed, sets the sad flag?

There was another "game" created a couple years ago that featured a fictional human (a little girl, if memory serves) on life support. They programmed it so that unless somebody in the world clicked a button in their browser, the girl would die within 10 seconds and the game would basically delete itself, ending forever. (The response was so strong that people flooded the server, and I believe their hosting provider blocked access to their site, thereby killing the program untimely.) If the little girl was removed, and the goal was to just keep the program running as long as possible on life support, would that be morally wrong?

I ask these questions because I don't think a even a complex script which is doing nothing more than attempting to fool me should be considered worth assigning rights to, even if it's really good at it. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure how to define consciousness in this regard, but I suspect it would require surprising its creators to the point that they cannot fathom how it behaved the way it did. Or maybe I'm confusing consciousness with free will. Either way, if the only thing separating a program that deserves human-level rights from those that don't is some combination of power (enough to scan all the valid responses and deliver the best one) and a wide array of responses linked to conversations, then I'd argue that all programs deserve the same basic human rights.

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