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Nope, the Turing Test has not been solved

Spot on, Gary.

To wit, in 1979 I write a chatbot that was very revealing to my teenage mind: it was a take on ELIZA called DR. CHALLENGER (since I didn't have access to the source code of Weizenbaum's program; btw the source code of DR. CHALLENGER is available online now). It was a non-directive psychotherapist like ELIZA. It totally fooled my dad, who was amazed, and projected intelligence and awareness into it. My sister-in-law on the other hand, more shrewd and skeptical, immediately elicited responses from the program that were, to her mind, obviously canned, fake, and mechanical.

This experience led me on a multi-year quest to understand and possibly engineer a real "mind" (artificial intelligence), or a "beauty computer" to make art, etc., and to find out what the heck intelligence and consciousness was. Long story short, I failed on the first task (learning a great deal about human minds, not to mention computers and software in the process), as *no one knows* what intelligence is, or where creativity comes from, though many claim they do – and in the course of decades, found out consciousness was real.

As I commented earlier, the mechanical nature of ChatGPT-4 was clearly and suddenly revealed, when I tasked it with helping me edit a re-wording of Atma-Darshan for modern English readers: a philosophical text by an Indian writer named Atmananda Krishna Menon from the early 20th century who wrote about consciousness (ironically, or aptly enough). What it revealed in a flash of clarity was that this system has *zero* real understanding of meaning, but is brilliantly designed to be an impressive spinner of textual language patterns, crafted on the fly according to one's prompting. But it will never arise above it's true nature as that; putting bits together from parts this way does not equal intelligence-consciousness…

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Lynna Burgamy

Update: 2024-12-04