A small research group recently examined the performance of 25 AI 'people', using two large language models created by OpenAI, in an online Turing test. None of the AI bots ultimately passed the test, but all the GPT 3.5 ones were so bad that a chatbot from the mid-1960s was nearly twice as successful as passing off as a human. Mostly because real people didn't believe it was really AI.
News of the work was reported by Ars Technica and it's a fascinating story. The Turing test itself was first devised by famed mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing, in the 1950s. The original version of the test involves having a real person, called an evaluator, talk to two other participants via a text-based discussion. The evaluator knows that one of the respondents is a computer but doesn't know which one.
