Artificial intelligence systems can now convince you they are human. Two large language models have passed the Turing test, which determines if a machine can “show the same intelligence as a human being,” said The Independent. This development is significant — and troubling, given the implications for deception and reality perception.
In the Turing test, a person “engages in text-based conversations with both a human and a machine without knowing which is which," said Stanford University. If the individual cannot tell them apart, the machine is considered to have passed the test. Researchers at U.C. San Diego tested four AI systems and found that the newer LLMs, GPT-4.5 and LLaMa-3.1-405B, can “effectively imitate people in short interactions,” said a study published in the journal PNAS.
“Given the right prompts, advanced LLMs can exhibit the same tone, directness, humor and fallibility as humans,” said study author Cameron Jones. “While we know LLMs can easily produce knowledge on nearly every topic, this test showed that it can also convincingly display social behavioral traits.”
GPT-4.5 was “judged to be the human 73% of the time, meaning interrogators selected it as ‘human’ significantly more often than they selected the real human participant,” U.C. San Diego said in a new release. LLaMa-3.1-405B “was judged human 56% of the time,” making it “statistically indistinguishable” from the real humans.
In one caveat, each of the systems was “instructed to adopt a persona or a specific character and communication style,” said The Independent. When the models were not prompted, they were much less likely to be mistaken for humans. |
