Taking the Turing Test
When do we stop caring if it's real?
In 1950, Alan Turing, Mathematician, wrote a test to determine a machine from a human. He wondered:
If a machine can think, it might think more intelligently than we do, and then where should we be?
In 2019, Leon Kowalski, Replicant, had to take a test to determine if he was a machine. He said:
I’m kind of nervous when I take tests.
Meet Alan - he’s real.
The quote is 75 years old. Not just a mathematician, Alan Turing was also a computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist. Alan was a deep thinker about AI before we called it AI. Here’s the paper he wrote discussing the inevitability of thinking machines. In that same paper he devised The Turing Test to distinguish between a human and a machine. Last year it was big news when Google claimed their AI had passed the turing test (it hadn't). Lot more headlines like this coming.
Alan also led the team of code-breakers that cracked the Nazi Enigma machine in WW II, saving millions of lives. The Imitation Game is a terrific movie about that and Alan's short, incredibly prolific, 41 year life.
Meet Leon - he’s not.
Leon is from the mind of Phillip K Dick made famous in Ridley Scott's Movie Blade Runner. He's one of a group of androids (replicants) on the run. In this scene an LAPD cop (Blade Runner) is giving Leon a variant of the Turing Test to see if he's real or not. Don’t ask Leon questions about his mother. Leon’s pretty real to me as I've seen Blade Runner like seriously at least a million times.
What about you - prove you’re human!
Some years ago, curious (and frustrating) challenge questions started popping up on web pages:
Ugh, why right? Well because a bot army was growing out there and trying to get the concert tickets before you or buying stuff with stolen credit cards or writing nasty comments on the Twitter.1
These puzzles are called CAPTCHA’s and like CHIPS, are another genius acronym. CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.
But CAPTCHAs do the opposite of what Turing was going for. Rather than identifying machines, if you pass a CAPTCHA challenge you claim your humanity so you can complete your online activities versus the zombie bot horde. CAPTCHAs thankfully are going away replaced in some cases by a little checkbox and in most cases just code in the background checking your online patterns (see cookies) to make sure you're for real. Automated activities are becoming commonplace, and the web is adapting to categorize content and actions accordingly.
Blurred lines2
The lines between what’s real and what’s artificial have been blurring for a while.
There was panic among educators around plagiarism when Google first went mainstream. Spawned an industry of plagiarism checking tools. When ChatGPT hit there was a decidedly different response - educators recognized it as a tool and encouraged students to use it with guidelines. Yesterday, the City of Oslo bought ChatGPT for every student and teacher3
I use Bing’s Copilot / GPT-4 for research - it handles any tangent I throw at it. But I don’t use it to write.
I use Bing / DALL-E for image generation in my articles and I also use it for ideas and inspiration for business Logos I design at Wirepine. Nowadays I recognize many of the images I see online are AI generated and I bet you don’t bat an eye anymore at the cover images that adorn every Wirepine Weekly post.
In my first AI Hot Take, I used the camera analogy - because when cameras were invented, photographs were derided as not 'real' because they were created by a machine. Then Photoshop became a verb describing refined digital photos. Remember when Instagram filters came out? #nofilter! AI is the latest technology - now incorporated into photoshop - enabling photo enhancement in lots of amazing ways. I cover more of this in my AI Take 2 article For Immediate Release. The umbrella term digital art continues to expand covering all these techniques.
I’m looking forward to AI remaking movies and videogames. Blade Runner still looks amazing but it’s 40 years old and an exception. We will be treated to wonderful and fantastical visuals and worlds in filmmaking in the coming years.
For a very real mix of human and machine check out Karin from Sweden and her robot hand fused with her real arm 🦾
A fool with a tool is still a fool
Turing called his test the 'Imitation Game'. It's setup like this:
C is the Interrogator or Judge with the job of deciding if A or B is the computer or the human by asking questions of the two behind a wall and judging from their written responses. It's pretty easy to see a future where A could 'imitate' human responses well enough to pass the test. It's harder to see a future where Leon the Replicant has to go through an emotional response test to tell if he's real or not but it's a great story.
The definition of 'real' will continue to evolve as AI gets into everything and helps us create new things.4
I’m not saying AI won’t be misused. I’m dreading the stuff that’s coming this election year. Fools will be fooled but we certainly have the capability to build in safeguards, so nobody loses a finger.5
Facebook was the super tech villain of the 2016 election spreading propaganda without checks and even worse enabling ad targeting based on personal info. This round they are at least putting on the appearance of getting out in front of it:
Labeling AI-Generated Images on Facebook, Instagram and Threads
In a couple of years, I don’t think these distinctions will be very important and maybe a few years after that a computer will be able to sufficiently imitate a human to pass the Turing test - and it won’t even make headlines6.
Not a philosopher, so here’s Alan again7 to take us home, from a BBC program he did Can digital computers think?
The whole thinking process is still rather mysterious to us, but I believe that the attempt to make a thinking machine will help us greatly in finding out how we think ourselves.
CAPTCHA Cracking quickly became an industry where shady companies developed code shims that redirected CAPTCHAs to digital sweatshops where armies of workers would sit solving CAPTCHAs 8 hours a day. 1,000 CAPTCHA’s for $1. They’re still around - here’s one - deathbycaptcha.com.
If you are a 2000’s baby or older you’ve heard the summer 2013 anthem Blurred Lines by Robin Thicke. While son of an Alan, Robin was not a mathematician or philosopher, or I suspect anything like Alan Turing. Nonetheless it’s a catchy song with a controversial video including an unrated version full of nude people that would not fly today.
When asked what the song meant, damn if Robin didn’t go full philosophical:
I've realized as I've gotten older that we all think we're living either in a black or white world, or on a straight path, but most of us are living right in between those straight lines. And everything you thought you knew, the older you get, you realize, 'Damn, I don't know nothing about this. I better pay attention, I better listen and keep learning.' So I think that, that's what I've been realizing these past few years.
If you click the link, be sure to click again for the Norwegian → English translation, thanks AI.
NVIDIA uses AI to design better AI AI Recursion!🤓
Pinky saw safeties are a thing. Table saws are scary. Cut through a 2x4 like butter but your fingers are doing the pushing so gah! So we invented ‘flesh sensing technology’ which stops the saw within milliseconds if detects your pinky instead of the 2x4 and doesn’t even leave a scratch.
Never mind, already happened:
One more quote from Alan, I love it when DALL-E comes up with a crazy picture based on my prompt!
We must not always expect to know what the computer is going to do. We should be pleased when the machine surprises us, in rather the same way as one is pleased when a pupil does something which he had not been explicitly taught to do.
Check out last week’s article!
