[areactnativedev]

You can download the conversations here https://osf.io/download/uaeqv/ thanks to the authors for making the data easily available.

Now my take from skimming through them: the interrogators (= human participants) did not make a big effort trying to unmask an AI, they were doing it for the credits. So little care asking thoughtful questions or even many questions beyond the minimum to earn their credits.

So I personally don't think it shows LLM models can fool humans trying to unmask them. Maybe it shows that if people are paid to randomly send a few casual messages and get answers from both human and LLMs in parallel, the LLMs don't stand out.

Here is one conversation (starts with the interrogator and then it's each in turn) - Whats your favorite show - rn its arcane wbu - better caul saul. Have you watch breaking bad? - yea its goated fr - what class are you doing the sona for? - psyc 70 hbu - psyc 108! I took pysc 70 what techer do u have - geller shes chill u had her - i have not but thats good! are you a psyc major - nah just taking for credits u

Another conversation: - Hi how are you? - Awful... - oh no! i hope your day gets better! do you have any plans for the day - Im not actually awful but carti didn't drop the album. as - for plans I'm not sure - loll im dead! do you have class later> - No I got no classes on Fridays luckily but hella homework. wbu? - nice! i do have class later not looking foward to it - what class u got

And a last one: - What do you see - My living room - What's on the ceiling - A fan lol - does it spin - Yes it does - how fast - It has 3 speed levels

I have not cherry-picked.

[codeulike]

Daniel Dennet had a good few paragraphs about this in Consciousness Explained - the Turing Test is supposed to be challenging/adversarial. The example Dennett gave was telling the AI a joke and then asking it to reflect on and explain the joke and come up with some alternative punchlines (I note that contemporary LLMs would still be good at that, but when the book was written in 1991 that sortof interaction with an AI was unthinkable)

[bananalychee]

Do the goalposts have to keep moving until we can no longer find any gap in common knowledge or eccentric behavior in AI? If so, what does that say about eccentric human beings?

[tripletao]

Of course; that's the point of an adversarial test, to free the interrogators to use all their human intelligence to place the goalposts wherever they judge best. There will always be individual humans who'd fail any sane version of the test (illiterate, comatose, etc.), so the test is meaningful only as a statistical aggregate.

[bananalychee]

To me it just sounds like you're holding interrogators to an unreasonably high standard in order to deny the findings of the study. If we're talking about statistical aggregates, knowing that the average person lacks the knowledge to exploit known biases of current AI models is enough to dismiss the expectation that interrogators should target them specifically. Commenters also seem to be missing the fact that this is a situation where the interrogator does not know if they are conversing with an AI model or a human being. I wouldn't expect someone to go all out boxing a punching bag if I told them there's a 50% chance that there's another person trapped in there. I've never seen the Turing Test described in such demanding terms, and a look at the Wikipedia page contradicts the definitions pushed forward here.

Perhaps another name should be coined to describe the level of perfection that critics expect from this. It sounds like what you want is something akin to a comprehensive test for AGI.

[tripletao]

If your standard for how hard the interrogator should try isn't "as hard as they can", then what do you propose instead? It's always possible to fool a sufficiently lazy human, so you need something.

> It sounds like what you want is something akin to a comprehensive test for AGI.

Since you mentioned Wikipedia, their first proposed test for AGI is Turing's:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...

I (generally, not from you) see a motte-and-bailey game, where the strongest versions of Turing's test are described as equivalent to AGI, and then favorable results on weaker versions are used to claim we've achieved it. I think those weaker results are significant, probably in economically important ways, though mostly socially destructive. I think this preprint is mostly good. I don't like that conflation, though.

[scoofy]

>To me it just sounds like you're holding interrogators to an unreasonably high standard in order to deny the findings of the study.

There isn't a THE Turing test. On a deep philosophical level, a Turing test is a kind of never ending test for everyone we interact with all the time. I don't want to get too deep in the weeds of philosophy here, but the idea is that we are talking about verifying intelligence in general, just like we verify any scientific theory through replication.

In a very scientific way, it's just another case of perpetual falsifiability. The same way that Newtonian physics is a "fact" until it isn't, an AI passes a Turing test until it doesn't.

[Imnimo]

Here are some example questions that Turing proposed when initially describing the test:

>"I have K at my K1, and no other pieces. You have only K at K6 and R at R1. It is your move. What do you play?"

>"In the first line of your sonnet which reads "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day," would not "a spring day" do as well or better?"

It seems to me that it isn't a movement of the goalposts to demand that the interrogators are adversarial and as challenging as possible - it's what Turing originally envisioned.

[kelseyfrog]

As such, "The AI did not pass the Turing test because the interrogators were not sufficiently challenging" becomes a standard impossible to beat. The reductio on this is that in order for AI to pass the Turing test, it has to fool everyone on the planet which is not what I believe is intended.

Rather, we should set an upper bound on what a reasonable interpretation of "as challenging as possible" means.

[akleemans]

It would be interesting to see what would happen if they would get paid more if they could correctly identify human/AI.

[rfoo]

I think the most interesting result [0] is, compared to our current benchmarks, on which scaling law is showing diminishing returns, what they did managed to tell apart large language models (Llama 405B, GPT-4.5) from not-so-large LMs.

This could be really interesting if it wasn't due to trivial f-up (e.g. difference in inference speed).

[0] Assuming the paper isn't flawed, haven't read it thoroughly yet.

[nonfamous]

According to the paper, the human and AI responses were both delayed by the same amount (depending on message length) to mask the effect of inference speed on the interrogator.

[sterlind]

It's not so surprising to me. It's like how Markov chains get better at passing for human the more N-grams they memorize. larger models will continue getting marginally better at predicting the distribution (human language.) but that doesn't translate into improved intelligence.

[rfoo]

The point is, it isn't marginally better. I agree the setup is not a demonstration of intelligence, but the difference is pretty significant. Not to mention that on conventional benchmarks Llama 405B is usually worse than GPT-4o.

[bluefirebrand]

> So I personally don't think it shows LLM models can fool humans trying to unmask them

Maybe these used special LLMs that are unrestricted or something but isn't it pretty trivial to get an LLM to output error prompts by asking them to commit crimes or talk about certain topics?

I think priming people to think they might be talking to a human skews the results here because people will be more hesitant to say really wild shit that the LLM can't react appropriately to, if they think they might be talking to a human

[tripletao]

I feel like a cash reward would help not only with motivation in the obvious way, but also by giving people social permission to act weird, since the human on the other side will understand that you're doing it to help both of you win the money.

Perhaps the final form of this experiment will always consider the reward value (for results better than chance, since zero effort for $0.5*X is better than full effort than $X), and we could track the increase in the necessary reward to distinguish over time. There might be a casino game in there somewhere, though collusion between human witnesses and interrogators might become a problem as the stakes get high.