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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com

It's no fun letting someone be so skeptical that they just answer "no" to everything that doesn't bleed protoplasm. "Move the AI goalposts as computers do more" is an old joke but begs the question.

aug 21, 2025, 1:46 am • 1 0

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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com

And it's not like the interrogator knows how *human* intelligence works, so asking that they be informed about AI internals is a bit much.

aug 21, 2025, 1:46 am • 1 0 • view
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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com

(Okay, they should know a lot about the failure modes of human intelligence. But then you should reject failures on both sides, right? Anyhow this is where Yudkowsky et al *started* so I'm staying away.)

aug 21, 2025, 1:46 am • 1 0 • view
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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com

Seems to me that the actual answer is that the "real" Turing Test must be a iterative process, where you learn more about what you're looking for as examples come in. Not moving the goalposts, but refining where you think they are. That's what's real-life happened over the past five years.

aug 21, 2025, 1:46 am • 1 0 • view
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Andrew Plotkin @eblong.com

So I'm giving up on a bright-line know-for-sure test -- fine! We couldn't even say what a "mammal" is without decades of research and proposed redefinitions. Why should "sentient" be simpler? The fun question is now whether the iteration converges.

aug 21, 2025, 1:46 am • 1 0 • view
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Elizabeth Sandifer @eruditorumpress.com

Yeah, I think the desire for a firmly refereed set of rules is largely a product of Turing’s plain autism and the fact that he didn’t anticipate how much people would want to project onto AIs. Skepticism still counts for a lot. A simple $20 reward for each successful ID would improve rigor nicely.

aug 21, 2025, 1:54 am • 0 0 • view
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Elizabeth Sandifer @eruditorumpress.com

It’s notable that the strong version of the test (comparative success with a human male at impersonating a woman) is resistant to goalpost moving.

aug 21, 2025, 2:07 am • 0 0 • view