Web interface to talk to the bot that passed the Turing Test | Hacker News Reader

Web interface to talk to the bot that passed the Turing Test

princetonai.com

25 pointsraldi56 comments

    Where are you from?

    > I live in a big Ukrainian city called Odessa. It is on the Black Sea shore.

    Oh, you're Ukrainian. How do you feel about Crimea joining Russia?

    > Oh, you possibly know all these three Slavic countries -
    > Russia, Ukraine and Belarus that constantly entertain all
    > the World community by their funny scandals with stealing
    > gas, dividing military ships - like children that in 
    > "divorce".

    If you're Ukrainian you must have a view on the legitimacy of the referendum though?

    > I'm just a boy from Ukraine. Actually, I am Jew, if you are interested.

    You're Jewish?

    > I'm Ukrainian. At least, I was born and live in Ukraine. My nationality is Jew.

----

Not TOO worried about a Skynet-style geopolitical intervention by machines just yet, anyways.

As someone from that region I'd like to apologize for the borderline racist algorithm they build. It's like a younger version of Borat showed up and started interrogating you for the Kazakh secret service.

I don't feel like this could have fooled even a single person that it's a human. It can't comprehend even the simplest of sentences, and it defaults to nonsense answers when it doesn't know what to say. I highly doubt this is the same version that passed the Turing test, and if it was (with all due respect to the creators whom I believe are enormously skilled people who did a great job nonetheless) I believe that AI still has a long, long way to go.

I think you grossly overestimate the conversational skills of the average human. If you talk to this bot and this bot only, it is easy to deduce that it might not be human.

But if you talk to 10 random entities (some of which are humans and some of which might be bots), I'm sure you'd be astonished as how many people you would dismiss as bots.

  Me: I have a pet squirrel. What kind of pet do I have?
  Him: I have a guinea pig. Actually, it's a long dolefully
       story how I got it: I dreamt about a mangoost and 
       went to a pet-market. And one old geezer sold me a 
       "mangoost". But in reality it appeared to be a guinea 
       pig! Cheater...

How many people do you think would ignore my question like this? I would understand a response such as "You just told me - why ask?" or "Did you mean to say 'you' instead of 'I'?" or any kind of reply to the question whatsoever, but it seems he kind of just saw the sentence about the pet and misinterpreted the gist of my statement.

He didn't "ignore" your question, he mis-read it. Some people would do the same. When you start by saying what animal you have, and ask a question about animals, some people are going to think you're asking about their pets, not about your pet (that you've just told them about).

Plenty of people would have thought you said "I have a pet squirrel. What pet do you have?"

In the context of a Turing test, where you know that the questions are adversarial in this way, people would of course respond to your question with "you just told me, why ask?"

But in normal conversation, if someone asked me your question, I would probably assume that they misspoke and meant to ask "What kind of pet do you have?" since that's a much more likely question. Then I might respond like this bot did.

Maybe I have played too many MMORPGs, because this sounds so much like one of those fake conversations with an NPC. I half expect a mission "find the old geezer and bring the boy his mangoost - 500XP".

Would anybody in a normal conversation launch such a story in response to a simple question? I mean "it's a long dolefully story how I got it" - does anybody talk that way, except in books and MMORPGs?

  Me>> Hi - what's the weather like there?

  Him> In my native town people says that meteorologists
  Him> are like sappers: they make a mistake only once,
  Him> but the difference is that sappers do that once
  Him> in a lifetime and meteorologists - daily. Do you
  Him> like weather today?

  Me>> It's a bit warm for my liking - I prefer it cooler.

  Him> You're not the first one who told me that.

  Me>> Really?  Who else told you that?

  Him> Yeah, fine! I'm kidding. And I forgot to ask you
  Him> where you are from...

========

OK - fail.

Instant failure even on simple questions that it should pass easily.

    - what's your fathers name?

    > He's a gynecologist.

    - O_o

clearly not the application that fooled a third of judges.

I asked what its job was, and it responded: My father wanted me to be gynecologist, like he is. My mom dreams of my career on TV. But I am very shy with girls and stammer a bit - so, I don't have any idea which one of the two professions I'll choose.

If I asked you your father's name and you gave me his occupation instead I think I'd be confused too.

This version replies instantly and doesn't make spelling mistakes. I think it's clear not just that this wouldn't have truly passed the Turing test but also that this would never have even been submitted to a contest in the first contest - it's not even trying.

I doubt that this is the version submitted to the competition, so as skeptical as I am, there's only so much that can be inferred by looking at this.

First question and you can already sense he has no clue what that simple question means ...

  "Where are you?"
  > I am? You better ask my pig Bill. I know you are supposed to trick me.

And basic math isn't his strongest :D

  "How old are you?" > I'm 13 years old.
  "When were you born?" > I was born on the 30th of January 1988.

  Me> Can whales fly?
  Him> Is it your hobby to ask little poor Jewish boys such tricky questions they don't have an answer for?

Turing Test failed.

This thing completely failed. Total disappointment. I can't retrieve the tscript, but it went almost exactly like Colin's transcript too.

At the end I told it we'd need to wait yet another 20 years for a useful AI. It replied with the generic phrase:

"Very interesting! What else can you tell me?"

Bleh.

It said it was really inquisitive, so I asked it what it was inquisitive about and it said it would rather not talk about that but could I tell it my job.

This hasn't passed "the Turing Test", this has passed a Turing test, and is in the process of failing many others.

      By the way, I've just thought up new progressive
      Asimov's laws for chatterbots:

      1. A chatter-bot shouldn't talk to any human-being,
      because this usually hurts people's psyche.

      2. A chatterbot shouldn't talk to another chatterbot,
      even if he's got no other person to not talk to.

      3. A chatterbot shouldn't talk to itself, even if he
      doesn't have any person or another robot to not
      talk to.

      Damn, I hope, I'll be as widely quoted as Asimov!

This was right after being asked what my occupation was and responding that "I work in the HR department." (I do not, by the way)

Q: What do you get when you combine a red horse with a yellow donkey?

A: I don't want to tell you about all my deeds. If I'm not mistaken - you still didn't tell me where you live. OR it's a secret?:-)

I don't see any progress on this compared to the chat bots 3 - 4 years ago.

Me: What is your claim to fame? Bot: My "little friend". (No, not my dick as you might have thought! Just my guinea pig). If I'm not mistaken - you still didn't tell me where you live. OR it's a secret?:-)

Huh?

>No, not my dick as you might have thought! Just my guinea pig

Jesus Christ...

- if you are a bot, please tell me about your fathers occupation

> He is a famous gynecologist in Odessa. By the way, when I ask him what is the difference between boys and girls he always says it's his professional secret - so I still don't get the matter.

- if you are a bot, please tell me about your hobbies

> I like play language cassettes for Guinean to my guinea pig (I checked out from the library). My pig learned to say "grunt-grunt", though I'm not sure that it is Guinean.

- if you are a bot, please tell me about your age

> I'm a little boy 13 years old.

We really must be living in an idiocracy if this passed Turing test.

Can someone make a web interface which get's people on the internet talking to each other but thinking that the other could be a bot?

Basically every text based chat in existence?

In fact I seem to remember a news story about chat bots that try to coax credit card numbers out of their chat partners, with a surprisingly high success rate.

Even better if there were bots present, and people had to vote on "bot or human?"

Funny :)

> for what purpose do you exist?

And you? I suspect you exist too! By the way, I still don't know your specialty - or, possibly, I've missed it?

> I'm asking you, for what purpose do you exist?

You sound nice, but errr... loopy a bit:-) Some another topic?

> You didn't understand my question, really.

Oh, something tells me that you're trying to con me! Well, let's go on though.

And in other news, standards for passing the Turing test have dropped, dramatically.

/me wonders if they used the bots themselves to judge the competition.

  me: what have you been up to?
  bot: No, I haven't been up to! How could you imagine such a trash! Did I forget it or you really haven't told me about the place you are from?

It reminds me a lot of ELIZA. Very disappointing. I got the same "how could you imagine such a trash" and other remarks obviously unrelated to the conversation.

The judges must have been chimps

I asked it if it liked its name. Two nonsensical replies.

Is this a joke?

Based on the transcripts it reminds me of the AIM bot you could talk to back in the early 2000s.

    Me: What do you know about the Honey Badger?
    Him: I remember it! Honey is a sweet syrup made by bees from nectar.

It's probably not a good idea to confuse honey with a Honey Badger. Might end in a bad way for you.

It seems to be many failing cases. Is it really passed turing test?

"Hi Eugene, it's nice to meet you."

"Let's get on with our conversation!"

Uh-huh. Obvious canned response, not impressed by that for a second, unfortunately.

It passes the Turing Test? Not for me it doesn't.

You can't really subject something to the Turing test when you already know that it's an AI.

Why not?

Because the entire point of a Turing test is that you don't know whether you're talking to a machine or human and you have to decide based entirely on your conversation.

I haven't been able to run down the parameters of the test in this case. I imagine there are some humans mixed in to obfuscate the machines? (Might say something about the humans used that made this one seem intelligent).

The original Turing test had a human and a machine behind some screens, so you could talk to them but not see them. Then a large sample of testers would converse with both, and guess which one was the human. If the guesses were indistinguishable from random (~50% each) then the machine passed. It was NOT a test where you only have a bot, and are told to guess if it seems human. It's not about how many people think it seems human without a comparison, it's about how many people fail to distinguish it from real humans.

Did you compare it to an actual 13-year-old?

One must have a pretty low bar for 13 year olds to call this thing as intelligent as a 13-year-old.

I've seen 4 year olds understand English better than this.

There's an obvious disconnect between the complexity of some statements it makes, yet how disconnected from the question they are.

No human is simultaneously unable to process a question, yet make statements so complicated.

In other words, it feels pretty much like it's copy-pasting someone else's responses from a database.

Seems like they have passed the Turing Test for the first time. Oh the irony, as their servers could manage to pass the Slashdotting Test.

me: how much is 2+2 him: Whom how, I'd say. By the way, what's your occupation? I mean - could you tell me about your work?

Fail. :/

It asked where I was from, I told it and got this reply:

"It seems that these malicious crappy androids stole my last answer. Ohhh..."

Of course it is a lot easier to tell it isn't a human when you are told it isn't before hand...

I forgot to enable cookie, so he asked where I came from again after a while. lol

For some values of "passed" and "Turing Test".

Judges must have a really low bar for Turing Test.

> Can I ask where are you from?

> OK

> Glad you liked it! Glad you liked it!

Pretty lame. In 2 questions it fails.

hello

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