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Comment by intrasight | Hacker News Reader

It has to pass the Turing test

LLMs started meaningfully passing the Turing test a year or two ago, around GPT-4.5. Is there another version or bar for "passing" you're looking for?

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23674

With how prevalent LLM verbal tics have become these days, I wonder if they're going to start un-passing the Turing Test at some point because of more and more people starting to notice and immediately clock these tics lol.

You're overindexing on the past 3-6 months, IMHO.

I might agree, GPT-4.5 was pretty close to peak conversationalist. Newer models are extremely cringe. 4.5 and o3 actually made me laugh on occasion. There might be a way of making Sol/Fable more human in its responses, but out of the box at least, they're terrible.

That’s using the default system prompt, right? Which is told to be an assistant.

My whole life the Turing test has been my benchmark. Mostly because I believed it would be impossible for a machine to pass, but also because I thought it was the most reasonable test of AGI.So, I'm not about to start moving goalposts now and calling everything that's been happening lately not AGI.

Turing never proposed that test as an actual benchmark of machine intelligence. On the contrary, the whole point of his thesis was that passing the test only shows the capability to pass that test, which only matters as far as we find that capability useful. He was arguing that the concept of intelligence just doesn't apply to studying machines, we should simply talk about what can they do.

Okay, I believe you; mostly because you appear to be a human and I'm not really in the mood to read through a paper from 1950 at the moment.

But I still stand by it being _my_ benchmark for machine intelligence, which is all I was claiming.

This paper is a pet peeve of mine. Look at the appendix! On page 22, you see a typical conversation people were judging based on. I'll reproduce one verbatim here:

Q: do you like doing psych studies and why?

A: theyre chill, easy money tbh

Q: yeah same. Could you give me an easy cupcake recipe off the top of your head?

A: nah i just get the box mix lol

Q: haha fair enough, i couldn't either. Last question, what's your favorite weird animal?

A: axolotl, theyre weirdly cute

And that's the whole thing. I looked through the data they shared and it's all like that. They even included ELIZA and it was judged human 23% of the time. I hope this wouldn't pass peer review... but they didn't even try, it's a preprint.

I'm barely holding it together here so you don't get the full spiel, but a quick skim of Turing's paper clarifies that it was never about a binary test. https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/turing.pdf Specifically sections 1 & 6 dispell the common myths, and the conclusion is also quite powerful.

Smart guy, that Turing. I wish he were still around... Linus but 114 years old and with 8 of that as the chair of a federated EU, kept alive by his own positive impact on dissolving the cold war into even more of a scientific boom. Would crazy helpful as we try to navigate the interesting times within which we have been damned.

A comforting thought, almost?

That's a very interesting thought that I hadn't had before: what would Turing think of where we've arrived with machine intelligence? What would be his approach for testing?

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