The Chinese Box and Turing Test: Is AI really intelligent?
Remember ELIZA? The 1966 chatbot from MIT’s AI Lab convinced countless people it was intelligent using nothing but simple pattern matching and canned responses. Nearly 60 years later, ChatGPT has people making the same mistake. Chatbots don’t think – they’ve just gotten exponentially better at pretending.
Alan Turing’s 1950 test set a simple standard: if a judge can’t tell whether they’re conversing with a human or machine, the machine passes.
By this metric, many chatbots are already “intelligent.” You can test this yourself at Turing Test Live. Recent studies from Queen Mary University and University College London found people can’t reliably distinguish human voices from AI clones.
That’s great news for scammers, not so good for the rest of us. Keep that in mind the next time your kid calls to ask for a quick loan via Venmo to pay for a car accident – it may not actually be your child in trouble but you and your bank account if you pay up.
Related Knowledge Center: Artificial intelligence
On top of a failing business model, newsrooms must navigate the powerful — and not fully reliable — new capabilities of artificial intelligence and the deployment of large language models.
State of the business model | Copyright and intellectual property