Has AI passed the Turing test yet? | Explained Premium

No AI has managed to successfully pass the Turing test by fulfilling the specific conditions he outlined

In 1950, British computer scientist Alan Turing proposed an experimental method for answering the question: can machines think? He suggested if a human couldn’t tell whether they were speaking to an artificially intelligent (AI) machine or another human after five minutes of questioning, this would demonstrate AI has human-like intelligence.

Although AI systems remained far from passing Turing’s test during his lifetime, he speculated that

Today, more than 70 years after Turing’s proposal, no AI has managed to successfully pass the test by fulfilling the specific conditions he outlined. Nonetheless, as some headlines reflect, a few systems have come quite close.

One recent experiment tested three large language models, including GPT-4 (the AI technology behind ChatGPT). The participants spent two minutes chatting with either another person or an AI system. The AI was prompted to make small spelling mistakes – and quit if the tester became too aggressive.

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With this prompting, the AI did a good job of fooling the testers. When paired with an AI bot, testers could only correctly guess whether they were talking to an AI system 60% of the time.

Given the rapid progress achieved in the design of natural language processing systems, we may see AI pass Turing’s original test within the next few years.