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Facebook M – The Anti-Turing Test

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Re: Facebook M – The Anti-Turing Test

#51

Post by throwaway7767 »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #30
mrdrozdov wrote: post #27

I don't get the part about the reverse number lookup. Couldn't they be using a disposable phone number that is allocated to Facebook? That's what Handy, Airbnb, Uber, etc. do. Why would they have to block their caller id? And how does either method prove or disprove that M is human?

That doesn't prove that M's human, what prove's it's human is that a Human voice called. The fact it says Facebook is just evidence that it was indeed from M, and not just him getting his friend to call him and pretend.

> The fact it says Facebook is just evidence that it was indeed from M, and not just him getting his friend to call him and pretend.

It doesn't really prove anything, since caller ID is extremely easy to spoof (I used to call my mates from the emergency number for kicks when I was younger). Not that I have any doubt as to the credibility of the story.

Re: Facebook M – The Anti-Turing Test

#52

Post by GFischer »

eli wrote: post #31
AJ007 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretending you have a working technology when you don't has been a recent theme in the startup world.

I hardly think that's a recent development. Plenty of technology has been sold that way for a long time.

It even has its own term, "Vaporware":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware

"Vaporware first implied intentional fraud when it was applied to the Ovation office suite in 1983; the suite's demonstration was well received by the press, but the product was later revealed to have never existed."

Re: Facebook M – The Anti-Turing Test

#53

Post by graeham »

drivers99 wrote: post #29
AJ007 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretending you have a working technology when you don't has been a recent theme in the startup world.

Thomas Edison claimed to have a long lasting light bulb before he actually did. He showed it to reporters one at a time in a booth. Between observers, he would change out the light for a fresh one. Source "How We Got to Now: Light" (on Netflix currently, at least in the US). Found the clip on PBS. Skip to 2:20 for the specific part: http://www.pbs.org/how-we-got-to-now/big-ideas/light/

He was also pretty bold on pricing, electing to set the initial price off what he predicted eventual costs of production would be. Initially, new products would be sold at a loss.

Perhaps not controversial in the perspective of modern venture-backed startups, but at the time it was a key reason GE won early market share on so many products.

Re: Facebook M – The Anti-Turing Test

#54

Post by maxerickson »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #41
maxerickson wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking the best match from a spell checker on unrecognized words will handle most of it. A threshold would probably work better against a mix of jumbled words and real gibberish.

Wonder if you can choose a sentence such that humans see it one way (homophones, jumbles), perhaps via context clues, but the closest match (edit distance?) for the individual words gives a different sentence? Certainly seems doable. Along those lines would be something like: "if I have a coin and I, err,trun tit, which face is showing?" but it's not a good example. Here "err, trun tit" gets corrected to return but t…

It's at least an interesting puzzle.

A better way to say what I was getting at is that fairly straightforward language statistics go a long way towards unjumbling letters. A spell checker could also include quite a few human perceptual quirks as scoring rules without crossing the line into what I would think of as training an AI.

Re: Facebook M – The Anti-Turing Test

#55

Post by bgilroy26 »

andreasvc wrote: post #46
fab1an wrote: post #5

Facebook's strategy here is to build an AI brand before they have the actual technology, which could make a lot of sense. At the same time the interactions between M's team and its users will provide meaningful data to train the AI on.

I've never heard vaporware characterized as something that "could make a lot of sense"; how could it? Plus I'm doubtful whether the data would be very meaningful. A bunch of people adversarially trying to figure out whether the AI is real is not representative or generally useful data.

They're expecting people to use it like Siri or Cortina or 'OK Google'

Re: Facebook M – The Anti-Turing Test

#58

Post by berdario »

ben_utzer wrote: post #40

Is it me or all the photos are blurred? I can't read them

It's not just you. It's basically unreadable on Firefox on Android (and what's worse... the page prevent arbitrary zooming, unless you "request the Desktop page").

It's depressing how a supposedly well-designed platform like Medium still falls short of providing an usable mobile interface.

Re: Facebook M – The Anti-Turing Test

#60

Post by jwalton »

Bad typing is definitely not enough to measure if an AI is really a human. As a teenager, I wrote a chatbot for an online text based game. I have it knowledge of a QWERTY keyboard layout, and when "typing" it had a small random chance of pressing the key next to the key it wanted to press. It would also sometimes transpose characters. Sloppy typing can be simulated.

Might be an interesting test to do a statistical analysis of your subject's mistakes against a corpus of real human mistakes, since there are many common mistakes humans make, and a random AI might make inhuman mistakes, but this would of course not be conclusive.

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