[nradov]

Yes I've seen those things. They are amazing technical achievements, but in the end they're just clever parlor tricks (with perhaps some limited applicability to a few real business problems). They don't look like forward progress towards any sort of true AGI that could ever pass a rigorous Turing test.

[DalasNoin]

Clearly language models can already fool people into thinking they are human, we might be getting quite close to the adversarial turing test already. In the end, a good initial prompt might be the solution to this, something like "pretend to be a human and step by step create a human identity that you then stick to during the conversation". I'm serious

[taneq]

Choosing a prompt that's a little bit meta seems to work surprisingly well sometimes. It'd be amusing and a little bit poetic if the key to artificial consciousness is to prime a transformer model with "convince yourself that you're human, while paying attention to how you feel".

[nradov]

A minority of the population will always be gullible and easily fooled. So what. Some people were already fooled by the original ELIZA program back in 1966. I would only count a Turing test pass if it can convince a jury of multiple educated examiners after a conversation lasting several hours.

[joe_the_user]

Fooling people with chatbots having clever language constructing has been done for a long, long time, see the Eliza effect[1]. Douglas Hofstadter gave a good demonstration of GPT-3 limitations[2]. GPT-3 is no doubt "better at what it is" than earlier language models. But that doesn't mean it's better at everything humans do with language (tell sense from nonsense, reasonable metacomments, etc).

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect [2]https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/06/09/artificia... Note: There's a critique of the article here but if you look at Radford Neal's comment, the point that GPT-3 is a clever lookup tool remains. https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/ADwayvunaJqBLzawa/contra-...

[nbardy]

They’re learning representations of objects. It’s more fundamental than tou seem to realize.

[taneq]

In the end we're all just clever parlor tricks. In the land of inanimate objects, the cleverest parlor trick is king, though.