this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
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The Turing test is flawed, because while it is supposed to test for intelligence it really just tests for a convincing fake. Depending on how you set it up I wouldn't be surprised if a modern LLM could pass it, at least some of the time. That doesn't mean they are intelligent, they aren't, but I don't think the Turing test is good justification.
For me the only justification you need is that they predict one word (or even letter!) at a time. ChatGPT doesn't plan a whole sentence out in advance, it works token by token... The input to each prediction is just everything so far, up to the last word. When it starts writing "As..." it has no concept of the fact that it's going to write "...an AI A language model" until it gets through those words.
Frankly, given that fact it's amazing that LLMs can be as powerful as they are. They don't check anything, think about their answer, or even consider how to phrase a sentence. Everything they do comes from predicting the next token... An incredible piece of technology, despite it's obvious flaws.
This is just conjecture, but I assume this is because the question of consciousness is not really falsifiable, so you just kind of have to draw an arbitrary line somewhere.
Like, maybe tech gets so good that we really can't tell the difference, and only god knows it isn't really alive. But then, how would we know not to give the machine legal rights?
For the record, ChatGPT does not pass the turing test.
ChatGPT is not designed to fool us into thinking it's a human. It produces language with a specific tone & direct references to the fact it is a language model. I am confident that an LLM trained specifically to speak naturally could do it. It still wouldn't be intelligent, in my view.