Hacker News Reader

Comment by vph | Hacker News Reader

This is not a Turing test. Please correct me if I am wrong, but I bet that none of this was drawn by a computer. Most likely, those that were supposedly "drawn by computers" were pictures drawn by humans but applied various type of filtering (e.g. those by the deep learning algorithms).

View on HN

Well, yea. It says as much on the page:

"one is painted by a human and another one is generated by artificial intelligence based on a photo and a style of a painter."

I find this to be easily "beatable" by simply judging which one is most likely to have its origin in a photo (vanity, and such) with a fallback on the one with a lot of repeating patterns.

I would say it is not a Turing test primarily because it does not involve a dialog between the examiner and the subjects.

I don't think programs written to imitate a craft, or even to learn to imitate a craft from examples, count as AI, no matter how impressive.

What about a photograph with filters applied to it? Does that count?

Think what would really count as a "visual turing test" is if the computer-generated images were really "generated" by a computer, not rendered from a photo. Still, it's an interesting exercise in how much the rendering can make the photo feel "opinionated"—as if you can sense the painter behind it; that's the criteria I used for choosing, but I got a 7/10.

> what would really count as a "visual turing test"

I disagree - nobody would say drawings/paintings (by humans) based on photos or observations by eye are less legitimate than scenes completely imagined.

How about the following: The examiner can provide any picture of their choosing to two subjects A and B, where one is a human and the other a machine. At the end of a reasonable period, both subjects respond to the examiner simultaneously with one drawing each, derived from that same picture. In creating each drawing, A and B are both trying to convince the examiner that they are human. The examiner then should identify which of the two subjects is a computer and which is human. To better reflect the traditional Turing test, the examiner should be able to repeat this process with different pictures (keeping the identities of A and B unknown, but fixed) before making their determination.

Interestingly, this is a Turing test that, when applied purely to humans, doesn't require said humans to share a common language.

That's a nice protocol.

I have to quibble though that the Turing test is meant to be a test of intelligence, and this sort of task seems pretty different, although it may actually be visual-AI-hard (to invent a new term). So may deserve a different name.

You can call it a test of human-level aesthetic sensibility if you'd think a highly intelligent alien species would be unlikely to share our aesthetics. Although, arguably, a highly intelligent alien would be able to understand our aesthetics to the point where they pass the test regardless...

I think you are teasing me, but my answer would be: no, it doesn't count. The Turing test is about "understanding". The filtering of those images has no understanding of what the images are about.

The Turing test is not about understanding, it's simply about distinguishability. The idea is measuring understanding is hard, but it's easy to try to distinguish the production of a machine in several parameters by doing a blind test. So a computer may actually "understand more" of something but be blatantly computer-like (by being much better than a human could ever produce) -- a chess expert may identify a top level chess AI that way -- and thus fail the Turing test. So it's more of a sufficient but not necessary intelligence test.

Those photo modifications kind of fit into that theme: if you can't distinguish the filters from real art, they passed an indistinguishability test.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com