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Comment by hrimfaxi | Hacker News Reader

The article touched on Turing's expectations for a computer to produce a sonnet and how those goal posts have changed and I have to ask myself would the average person even pass that test today? If you ask a person to say how their day was in the form of a haiku they wouldn't even know where you're talking about. AI has exceeded the capabilities of the average person in a few subjects it would seem. Does that say more about the state of intelligence today or about the nature of consciousness in general?

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Asking someone to write a sonnet or haiku isn’t a good test of intelligence. It’s a test to see if they've studied a particular literary art form and recall the details enough to arrange some words in a way that meet a set of rules which have no applicability to daily life.

Mechanical intelligence and human intelligence are not the same.

We can design and build objects that behave like humans that innately are not. But these things came from humans. They did not come into existence on their own. We have as a species used leverage to move the species forward.

This whole discourse is a complete waste of time.

From my perspective all this says is that you have a very grim view of others intelligence.

The post you're responding to makes no claims about the intelligence of others. The claim that's being made is that the majority of laypersons don't really know how to construct a sonnet or a haiku.

You're conflating that with a claim about intelligence because the true claim was not explicitly stated. One has to read critically, as if analyzing a poem.

> AI has exceeded the capabilities of the average person in a few subjects it would seem.

> Does that say more about the state of intelligence today or about the nature of consciousness in general?

Yeah I’m not sure why they would bother responding to a child comment without reading the parent but there we are.

> If you ask a person to say how their day was in the form of a haiku they wouldn't even know where you're talking about. AI has exceeded the capabilities of the average person in a few subjects it would seem.

Language models don’t have a “day” to write about.

Replace "their day" with any other topic. The important part of the statement is that most people would find it hard to write poetry in any given specific form (be it a haiku, limerick, or sonnet in iambic pentameter), because knowledge of those forms isn't particularly common, and most people haven't read copious amounts of poetry written in those forms.

I like the idea that if you simply replace “having an experience and translating it into words” with “remember 5-7-5” as a measure of intelligence then poetry is an example of chat bots being smarter. Similarly, “my toaster’s ability to toast bread makes it more powerful than any human on earth” is a true statement given a reasonable interpretation of the word “power”.

Sure :)

Though I'd argue that the metaphor only works insofar as we believe that toasting bread is something are uniquely qualified to do, just like the original statement assumes that poetry is a uniquely human skill. (Though I do agree that the ability for subjective experience is an essential component of consciousness. I'll be buggered if I know how to define that, though)

Technically, that's a skill test, not an intelligence test. Intelligence measures rate of learning (kinda), so a good test would be something like: a Xonet is a poem of this form I just invented (Iambic rhythm, 15-9-6-15 verses), Xenglish is this language with these words, build a xonet that's grammatically correct in Xenglish and respects the structure in under 1 hour, in as few tries as possible, with an oracle that judges Xbeauty, which you'd also have to appease.

Even that is still fundamentally concerned with an an ability.

Every simple externally observable action or reaction can be replicated by something purely mechanistic.

We can't help but assign our own explaination for everything we see. We see something seek food or avoid damage, and we do those same things, and when we do it we are aware of it and feeling something about it.

But tropism is a very simple system that can have the same outward effect with nothing self aware or feeling behind it.

And on the flip side, a human can perform simple mechanical acts like turning a crank that a motor could do. Turning a crank doesn't prove that a person is merely a machine, nor that a motor wonders about the inner life of other motors.

Whatever the ways are to tease out the difference between a person and an animal or machine, it can't be anything as simple as something it can do better than say a dog. It has to be about what it chooses to do.

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