> The heightening of the bar is an attempt to deny that milestones were surpassed and to claim that LLMs are not intelligent.
That was never "the bar"; nobody denies that milestones have been surpassed; none of those milestones are relevant to the question of intelligence.
> We had a threshold for intelligence. An LLM blew past it and people refuse to believe
Have you ever actually looked at contemporary (to Turing) examples of what people thought "passing a Turing test" might look like? It's abundantly clear to me that we were simply wrong about what the output would have to look like in order to convince human judges in the 2020s.
Even examples from much more recently (see e.g. on http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminar/1213/Hawke_TuringTest....) suggest a very different approach to the test than prompting ChatGPT and marveling at the technical accuracy of its prose.
(Exercise: ask an LLM to write a refutation to your comment from the perspective of a human AI skeptic. Notice the ways in which it differs from mine.)
> Everyone still thinks all an LLM does is regurgitate things.
No; people still think LLMs aren't intelligent. Because they aren't, and they cannot become so in principle. They can do many things that are clearly beyond "regurgitation" (as we would otherwise apply the word to computer programs), but none of those things are the result of intelligence. Producing a result that could plausibly come from an intelligent system does not, in fact, demonstrate that the actual system producing it is also intelligent. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism wasn't intelligent, either, and applying a power source to turn the gears wouldn't have made it so, either.
> They don’t want to define an LLM as intelligent even if it meets the Turing test technical definition of intelligence so they change the technical definition.
The Turing Test was never a "technical definition" of intelligence. Turing's original paper (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computing_Machinery_and_Intell...) spoke of "thinking" rather than "intelligence". Besides, the "Imitation Game" is presented as a substitute problem exactly because "think" cannot be clearly enough defined for the purposes. The entire point:
> As Stevan Harnad notes,[7] the question has become "Can machines do what we (as thinking entities) can do?" In other words, Turing is no longer asking whether a machine can "think"; he is asking whether a machine can act indistinguishably[8] from the way a thinker acts. This question avoids the difficult philosophical problem of pre-defining the verb "to think" and focuses instead on the performance capacities that being able to think makes possible, and how a causal system can generate them.
But the usual processes of pop science seem to have created a folk wisdom that being able to pass a Turing test logically ought to imply intelligence. This idea is what has been disproven, not the AI skepticism.