Quote:
Originally Posted by lisarea
So I saw this headline about how a computer beat a Turing test, but I had to go do some shit so I couldn't read it. So I went and did that shit, and was thinking about how that's pretty great, and I was totally looking forward to seeing what exact milestone it reached or whatever.
So then, when I am finally done and ready to find out, I find out this.
Following is a non-exhaustive list of who I am mad at right now:
1. Dumb assholes lying in press releases.
2. Dumb media signal boosting press releases without even fucking looking at anything else.
3. Me, for thinking for two seconds that anything some stupid newspaper might actually be telling me something I care about. ESPECIALLY about this kind of thing. They are just super extremely always wrong. |
I think the research team is especially culpable in this case. I have some interest in the Turing Test, it makes pretty good sense in some forms. Computers pass versions of the test all the time. I read an article about a person who takes part in some turing tests as a human. His job is to convince people that he is in fact human.
According to the article that I read, one of the programmers who won made a point to say that this was special because the test wasn't limited. The people could talk about anything. In some other tests, the tester may be told this is an expert in Shakespeare so the conversation is directed.
Making your computer a semi fluent/literate recent immigrant child from the Ukraine is completely garbage in the context of a free form Turing test. If the test was not supposed to be free form, then sure make it limited in some interesting way. It might be a little cheap but not that bad. In this context, the AI is just garbage. The programmers might as well have said, "We couldn't work out how to make a good program so we thought of how we could possibly game the system with our shit programming skills and limited intellect. We are not smart enough to feel shame or a even decreased amount of pride in our 'victory.' "