...Instead of a machine trying to convince someone they’re human through conversation — which was the premise of the original Turing Test, outlined by British scientist Alan Turing in his seminal 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” — the Minimal Turing Test asks for just one word, either chosen completely freely or picked from a pair of words.
The researchers responsible, John McCoy and Tomer Ullman, clarify that the Minimal Turing Test isn’t a benchmark for AI progress, but a way of probing how humans see themselves in relation to machines. This question is going to become increasingly relevant in a world filled with AI assistants, deepfaked humans, and Google auto reply handling your email. In a world of human-like AI, what do we think sets us apart? What makes us different?
In the first of McCoy and Ullman’s two tests, 936 participants were asked to select any word they liked that they thought could be proof of their humanity. Despite the free range of choices, results clustered around a small number of themes. The four most frequently picked words were “love” (134 answers), “compassion” (33 answers), “human” (30 answers), and “please” (25 answers), which made up a quarter of all responses. Other clusters were empathy (words like “emotion,” “feelings,” and “sympathy”), and faith and forgiveness (words like “mercy,” “hope,” and “god”).
...In the second test, 2,405 participants had to choose between pairs of words, deciding which of the two they thought was given by a human and a machine. Again, words like “love,” “human,” and “please” scored strongly, but the winning word was simpler and distinctly biological: “poop.” Yes, out of all of the word pairings, “poop” was selected most frequently to denote the very essence and soul of humanity. Poop....
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