
Lust and the Turing test - samclemens
http://blogs.nature.com/aviewfromthebridge/2015/05/27/lust-and-the-turing-test/
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one-more-minute
I suspect that passing the Turing test doesn't actually correlate well with
having human-like AI.

The thing about the Turing test is that it's just too hard. Getting a machine
to convincingly pretend to be human is like getting a human to convincingly
pretend to be _another_ human – you'd have to answer questions about life and
emotional experiences you'd never had, and actually, most people who try that
won't hold up to a good interrogator.

Add to that the fact that you build a theory of human minds largely by drawing
on your experience of your own mind – an AI without experience can only draw
on the information it's given. A machine that can empathise despite that is
well beyond human intellectual capability already.

To put it another way: Even if we assume that a human-level AI has exactly
human-like thinking, it's going to be pretty damn obvious if you're talking to
a human who was literally born yesterday, so the AI still fails the test.

~~~
fsk
I'm having a hard time finding humans who can pass the Turing Test.

Try explaining to someone "Taxation is theft!" or "Inflation is theft!" and
watch their brain shut down. It'd be really hard to get an AI to emulate human
insanity accurately.

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jordigh
Ex Machina is a work of fiction. It says a lot more about its authors than it
says anything about humans, artificial intelligence, or sex. In this case, it
says that the authors really think female bots are about sex and male bots do
not necessarily have to be about sex.

[http://www.wired.com/2015/04/ex-machina-turing-bechdel-
test/](http://www.wired.com/2015/04/ex-machina-turing-bechdel-test/)

The only example of a sexualised male bot in fiction I can think of is Gigolo
Joe in AI, and maybe Schwarzennegers' insistence on being nude in Terminator
scenes. Chappie, Johnny 5, the Iron Giant, HAL 9000, the nameless robots in
the I, Robot movie; none of them had to put up with being a sex object. There
is overwhelmingly a huge skew towards sexualised fembots, to the point where
being sex objects is their usual definining characteristic in fiction, whereas
other male or ambiguous bots have a chance to explore a larger philosophical
world in fiction.

~~~
Frozenlock
"In this case, it says that the authors really think female bots are about sex
and male bots do not necessarily have to be about sex."

Wait, what?

 __\--- Spoilers --- __

If anything, the authors think of humans (more specifically men in the movie)
as being all about sex.

Ava plays the seduction game because she(it) knows humans are susceptible to
it.

I'm a machine, have google-like knowledge of human interaction, have a nice
artificial body, and I know I can deceive everyone simply by looking
defenseless. What's the most straightforward way to obtain what I want? To
tell everyone to fuck off? No, not really....

The way she(it) acted was the cold and logical thing to do.

~~~
jordigh
The authors wrote a story in which all of the bots are female and they're
female for the express purpose of sex. There's no "it" here, and even the
author tried to weasel out by saying that the robot doesn't actually have a
sex. The robots are all female, they are all presented sexually, and this says
more about what the authors think of robots and female sexuality than anything
else.

~~~
Frozenlock
There is a "it", _that's the whole point of the movie_!

The twist is when you realize that it wasn't a woman (which you can easily
forget by how 'human' it acts), but a heartless robot doing everything in its
power to obtain what it wanted.

"and even the author tried to weasel out by saying that the robot doesn't
actually have a sex"

There's like 5 minutes where the protagonist discuss with the builder about
why he gendered the robots. The authors were clearly aware they could have
made a non-gendered robot.

(Now, the builder was enjoying them sexually, but that's a character in a
story, not the authors.)

Of course, the ultimate need for a gendered robot is create the set for the
story.

1\. To get us, the audience, to be able to relate to it. Nobody is going to
care if you format a super-toaster hard drives. They will if the toaster looks
and act like a human being.

2\. To enable the protagonist to be even more emotionally involved with the
robot.

"and this says more about what the authors think of robots and female
sexuality than anything else."

It says they know how to write a story, not much more.

~~~
jordigh
They write a story that reinforces your presuppositions that the best way for
women to get ahead is to use their sexuality. You already agreed with the
authors before you saw their story. It is a common male fear. Males dominate
women but feel powerless against their sexuality.

It is not about an AI at all. That's a distraction. Not once were you expected
to think that Ava might fail the "Turing Test" they prepared for her. She is
presented as a human with shiny skin, and the way for her to get ahead is to
use sex.

Or as someone else mentioned in this thread, if she's not sexy, then what
makes her female at all? The story reinforces your bias that the form and
function of womanhood is primarily sexual.

------
toolslive
horny humans are easily fooled:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natachata](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natachata)

~~~
jordigh
In a past job, we had a service that would receive natural-language queries
about movies and respond with movie times and locations. Some men were
convinced that the responses were generated by a female human (this was in
Spanish, so I know of their assumptions based on grammatical gender) and
started trying to chat up our bot. The logs were simultaneously hilarious and
sad.

I repeat: our bot just responded with movie times. Men were trying to get laid
with it. :-( :-)

------
facepalm
Aren't there IRC bots already that successfully convince conversation partners
to give them their credit card numbers?

~~~
cousin_it
Yeah. There are also bots that bring people to orgasm, and bots that hypnotize
people over a text channel.

I suspect that we might get bots that win AI-box experiments (convince a human
gatekeeper to type the phrase "I let you out") long before we get "true"
artificial intelligence. People are just too exploitable.

~~~
schoen
Wow, having an AI-box chatterbot would be quite a thing.

This may not be exactly the site for this discussion, but...

When Eliezer did the famous AI-box experiments, there was a precondition that
the human is supposed to accept claims by the AI to have demonstrated specific
abilities (like curing cancer, solving math problems, or disclosing technical
data about itself). Is it worth imagining a "nightmare difficulty" AI-box
experiment where humans don't have to take the AI's word for it about anything
outside of the text channel? Are there humans (or will there be chatterbots)
that can win under those conditions too? How about against a more diverse set
of conversation partners, with a wider range beliefs and attitudes toward AIs?
How about if the AI's tactics _don 't have to be kept secret_?

(I'm not trying to minimize the significance of what Eliezer accomplished in
those demonstrations, just curious about the prospects for even-more-difficult
variants.)

