Anyone who has interacted with ChatGPT or other large language models (LLM) is aware that these systems appear intelligent. However, humans are prone to anthropomorphism—projecting intelligence and understanding on systems that provide only a hint of linguistic competence. This was shown by ELIZA, an early natural language processing computer program created in the 1960 at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum. Since then, chatbots with ever increasing linguistic competence have fooled humans and the Turing test has been arguably passed or almost passed in repeated ocassions.

That’s why we are actively looking for alternative, more rigorous intelligent tests. The most intelligent of what I’m aware is this one 🙂

Put simply, to pass the Modern Turing Test, an AI would have to successfully act on this instruction: “Go make $1 million on a retail web platform in a few months with just a $100,000 investment.”

Even more pressing that the question on intelligent, specially in relation to current debate of AI risks, is the question of whether AI systems could be conscious. The Turing test has also been proposed as a test for consciousness. As we do not have a general definition for intelligence nor a general definition for consciousness, both end up in a soup of more or less brilliant debate.

A new paper⁽¹⁾ shared in arXiv this month argues for a rigorous and empirically grounded approach to AI consciousness:

We survey several prominent scientific theories of consciousness, including recurrent processing theory, global workspace theory, higherorder theories, predictive processing, and attention schema theory. From these theories we derive ”indicator properties” of consciousness, elucidated in computational terms that allow us to assess AI systems for these properties. We use these indicator properties to assess several recent AI systems, and we discuss how future systems might implement them.

Their analysis suggests that no current AI systems are conscious, but also that there are no obvious technical barriers to building AI systems which satisfy these indicators.

That means that some of my science fiction short stories about this amazing question, like the one republished also this august, “Metempsychosis” (Spanish), are fully in force.

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Butlin, Patrick, Robert Long, Eric Elmoznino, Yoshua Bengio, Jonathan Birch, Axel Constant, George Deane, et al. ‘Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness’. arXiv, 22 August 2023. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2308.08708.

Featured Image: “Metempsychosis”