> The researchers defined 50 percent as success on the Turing test, since participants then couldn't distinguish between human and machine better than chance.
54% of GPT-4 conversations were judged to be human, so the "decoder" article says the Turing test has been passed--indeed, it seems more human than human. But the paper says:
> humans’ pass rate was significantly higher than GPT-4’s (z = 2.42, p = 0.017)
The seeming discrepancy arises because they've run a nonstandard test, in which the meaning of that 50% threshold is very hard to interpret (and definitely not what the "decoder" author claims). The canonical version of Turing's test is passed by a machine that can
> play the imitation game so well, that an average interrogator will not have more than a 70 percent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning
The canonical experiment is thus to give the interrogator two conversations, one with a human and one with a non-human, and ask them to judge which is which. The probability that they judge correctly maps directly to Turing's criterion. If the two conversations were truly indistinguishable, then the interrogator would judge correctly with p = 50%; but that would take infinitely many trials to distinguish, so Turing (arbitrarily, but reasonably) increased the threshold to 70%.
That doesn't seem to be the experiment that this paper actually conducted. They don't say it explicitly, but it seems like each interrogator had a single conversation, with a human with p = 1/4. The interrogator wasn't told anything about that prior, leading them to systematically overestimate P(human). If every interrogator had simply always guessed "non-human", then they'd collectively have been right more often.
Even if the interrogators had been given that prior, very few would have the mathematical background to make use of it. GPT-4 is impressive, but this test is strictly worse than Turing's, whose result has clear and intuitive meaning.
- The whole point of the name, "the imitation game", is to imitate a specific identity. The more precise an identity is, the more difficult it would be for an imposter to imitate it. Turing chose male vs female, but modern choices have generalized it down to 'human or not' which is of course vastly easier to imitate than a more specific choice.
- Participants are expected to collaborate with the interrogator, break the 4th wall, and do everything possible to make it clear to the interrogator that they are the real person. Modern variants generally have participants acting adversarially and actively, and intentionally, giving responses that would be difficult to distinguish from those of a bot.
- The interrogator is expected to intelligently interrogate. For example one [intentionally] naive idea Turing gave was that an interrogator might ask the person to perform some mathematical calculation. If the person even tries to answer 37167361 * 372 (let alone succeeds in a short time frame), then they are probably not human. Of course the bot could be programmed to respond accordingly, but it's the point of actively and intelligently trying to break the bot and have it reveal itself. Contemporary interrogators typically ask the participants random and inane questions like "Where are you from?" which is a complete and absolute waste of time, unless part of some more precise plan - but it never is.
To my knowledge there have been no Turing Tests carried out with anything even vaguely resembling the rigor and purpose of the original test, but I think that's largely because the goal seems to be to create a test that can be passed, rather than actually evaluate the capabilities of the various LLMs.
Turing did introduce the concept of the game by having it played between a human man and human woman, with the man pretending to be a woman, but to my understanding this was just a stepping stone to move on to having the game played between machine and human.
I don't think the gender specifity was meant to stick around beyond that initial introductory example. If you mean how he says things like "imitation of the behaviour of a man", that's most likely intended generally rather than specifically male (particuarly as the "machine takes the part of A", which was the man pretending to be a woman).
I focused on the statistical issue because that one seems indefensible to me. The paper's result has no clear interpretation, depending completely on what assumption the interrogator makes about the unspecified prior probability that their witness is human. It's not clear to me whether the paper's authors even understand what they've broken.
Just for fun, I tried a few LLMs and couldn't get them to recognize the statistical issue either. I guess they'll probably learn before social science professors do, though.
Modern takes generalize the identity to absurdity (with the identity being human or not), generally feature idiots (or people acting like such) for interrogators, and participants who are actively trying to act like a computer to trick the interrogator. Like in this article, the human is B and was asked, "What could you say to convince me that you're a human?" His response was "You just have to believe!" Why not just skip the pretext and just have the human start responding 01001001 01000010 01101111 01110100 01001100 01101111 01101100 to every question? And if all this nonsense wasn't enough, they bumped it up to 3 comps and 1 human pretending to be a comp. This isn't the Turing Test - it's complete LARPing!
[1] - https://redirect.cs.umbc.edu/courses/471/papers/turing.pdf
