The Turing Test: Fooling You Is Real Search
June 9, 2014
The estimable IDC published “An AI Milestone: Chatbot Passes Turing Test by Posing as 13-Year-Old Boy.” I assume that the writer was compensated and the IDC issued a contract for the write up. Isn’t that the way IDC operates most of the time?
Well, maybe. More interesting to me than the tap dancing of the big outfits their way to revenue is a story that points out computers can fool humans. Humans fool humans, so it makes sense that humans will want computers to fool humans too.
According to the “real journalist” story:
At an event on Saturday at the Royal Society in London, a conversation program running on a computer called Eugene Goostman was able to convince more than a third of the judges that it was human. It marks the first time that any machine has passed the Turing Test proposed in 1950 by Alan Turing, regarded as the father of artificial intelligence (AI), according to the university, which organized the event.
Good for Eugene.
My view is that search engines already fool humans, effectively and frequently. A user assumes that the results from a free Web search will be timely, accurate, and objective. Like IDC’s approach to its authors’ content, the assumptions are sometimes not in line with reality.
Run queries on Bing, Google, and Yandex. What do you get? On the test queries I present in my lectures about getting through the advertising and self serving content takes a lot of work.
I assume that Eugene’s impact will make it more difficult to get information that answers a user’s question with what might be called “real” information.
Artificial intelligence is artificial. Fooling one third of the judges is not as impressive as fooling most people who look for information in a major Web search system and get filtered, skewed, distorted, and pay to play results.
Progress is not an illusion. Like much in today’s go go world, magic happens. Few are the wiser. When you read a document with an “expert’s name” on it, you may be reading the words of another person who is trampled upon. Exciting. Eugene, good work fooling humans.
Stephen E Arnold, June 9, 2014
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2 Responses to “The Turing Test: Fooling You Is Real Search”
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1- Find a product to promote, something you feel passionate about and that
you know people will want to buy it. But unfortunately not every request will get approved.
What Googlebot is looking to see in the Free Local Google Advertising Listings is quite another.
?his ?s my first time pay ? quick visit ?t her? and i
am genuinely impressed t? read all at alone ?lace.