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by OJFord 1630 days ago
> Long story short, I proposed the question to the chatbot in all its complexity, assuming it would be handed over to a human agent to read the transcript. The chatbot immediately understood the question and provided the exact response I needed.

How do you know it did? I.e. that a human it was passed to didn't just pass your inverted Turing test!
2 comments
tobyjsullivan 1630 days ago
In my case, I inferred due to the speed of the response. (It was even formatted fancy). So while it's conceivable that a human could have intervened, they would have had to be reading the conversation in real-time and ready to click a one-button response immediately which seems like it would defeat the purpose.

Perhaps the real question is: if a chatbot is powered by a human instead of AI, but I can't tell because the interface is consistent, is it not a chatbot?

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CRConrad 1630 days ago
> Perhaps the real question is: if a chatbot is powered by a human instead of AI, but I can't tell because the interface is consistent, is it not a chatbot?

The Mechanical Turk[1] was a hoax, not an early mechanical AI, so no. It's a chat interface -- perhaps with some pre-sorting and context-extracting preludes that save the human operator at the other end some time, but still just an interface -- between the human chat operator and you.

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1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk

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acdha 1630 days ago
This is one of the big confounds: a lot of the companies which brag about AI prowess are relying on a bunch of generally not well paid humans to cover the gaps.
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