If the machine or artificial intelligence program surpasses human intelligence or matches it, does that mean it can perfectly imitate humans? If the answer is yes, what about thinking – our ability to apply logic and think rationally before making decisions? How can we determine whether an artificial intelligence program is capable of thinking? To attempt to answer this question, a team of researchers proposed a new framework that functions like a psychological study of software.
New Test for Evaluating Artificial Intelligence
The researchers suggest that the standard methods for evaluating machine intelligence, such as the Turing Test, can only tell you if the machine is good at processing information and mimicking human responses. Current generations of artificial intelligence programs, such as Google’s LaMDA and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, for example, have come close to passing the Turing Test; however, the test results do not mean that these programs can think and reason like humans.
Problems with the Turing Test
During the Turing Test, evaluators play different games involving text-based communication with real humans and artificial intelligence programs (machines or chatbots). It is a blind test, so the evaluators do not know if they are communicating with a human or a chatbot. If artificial intelligence programs succeed in generating human-like responses – to the extent that evaluators find it hard to distinguish between a human and an AI program – it is considered that the AI has passed the test. However, because the Turing Test relies on subjective interpretation, these results are also personal in nature.
Limitations of the Turing Test
The researchers propose that there are several limitations associated with the Turing Test. For example, any of the games played during the test are traditional games designed to test whether the machine can imitate humans or not. Evaluators make decisions solely based on the language or tone of the messages they receive. The ChatGPT program is great at mimicking human language, even in responses where it provides incorrect information. Therefore, the test does not assess the machine’s ability to think and reason logically.
Additionally, Turing Test results cannot inform you whether the machine is capable of internal thought. We often reflect on our past actions and contemplate our lives and decisions, a critical ability that prevents us from repeating the same mistakes. The same applies to artificial intelligence, according to a study from Stanford University which suggests that machines that can engage in self-reflection are more effective for human use.
“An AI agent that can leverage past experience and adapt well through exploring new or changing environments will lead to more adaptive and flexible technologies, from home robots to personalized learning tools,” said Nick Haber, an assistant professor from Stanford University who did not participate in the current study.
Furthermore, the Turing Test fails to analyze an AI program’s ability to think. In a recent Turing test, GPT-4 was able to convince evaluators that they were communicating with humans more than 40 percent of the time. However, this result does not answer the fundamental question: Can an AI program think?
Alan Turing, the famous British scientist who created the Turing Test, said, “A computer deserves to be called intelligent if it can deceive a human into believing it is human.” His test covers only one aspect of human intelligence, which is imitation. While it is possible to deceive someone using this single aspect, many experts believe that a machine will never achieve true human intelligence without including those other aspects.
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It is unclear whether passing the Turing test is a meaningful criterion or not. It does not tell us anything about the system’s ability to perform tasks or understand anything, or whether it has developed a complex inner dialogue or can plan in abstract timeframes, which are fundamental to human intelligence,” said Mustafa Suleyman, an AI expert and founder of DeepAI, to Bloomberg.
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