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Being queer and in IT, there’s a decent chance Alan Turing would have been a furry.
Let that sink in.
“It’s me,” Alan said. “But Rudy’s joking. ‘Turing’ doesn’t really have an umlaut in it.”
“He’s going to have an umlaut in him later tonight,” Rudy said, looking at Alan in a way that, in retrospect, years later, Lawrence would understand to have been smoldering.
Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
I finally read that last year. What a wild read, worth the intimidating length.
For some reason the historical figure “I am quite fond of x” meme template kills me every time
“You mean I can just tell people I’m gay and I won’t be committed or imprisoned??”
“Or chemically castrated?!”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Homosexuality_and_indecency_conviction
At the moment…
“Good lad, pray tell, what is this ‘felching’ and ‘cruising’ mentioned by this handsome fella in my private telegrams?”
‘Cottaging’ as a term dates back to the 30s so the concept of cruising might not be as foreign as you’d think
This meme has always struck me as homophobic. It’s doing the same thing the English government did after the war: focusing on his sexuality while ignoring his scientific contributions. At least the AI bros depicted here are trying to consider what his opinions would be about something other than his sexuality.
Sexuality is supposed to occupy a small, benign area of a person’s life. It’s annoying when people accuse gay people of making everything about their gayness. Society does that to them, and they’re just reacting to society obsessing over their personal lives.
Tou don’t think someone who was criminalised for his sexuality in his lifetime might enjoy being able to freely and openly participate in it? You are reaching.
I’d say the joke isn’t just about Turing being out of character by characterizing himself in a way he really wasn’t (as in he didn’t really go around saying he was gay, but the UK government made a big deal out of it), but mostly about him being more interested in technological progress that solved something he might have cared about just a bit instead of his own field of research, which he most certainly cared about a lot.
I get that you are concerned, I just think it’s a bit of an overreaction on a site where neither OP nor probably anyone else seeing this meme thought “haha it’s funny because he was gay as in going to hell”.
There are absolutely gay people who choose to make being gay their entire identity, and those people suck. Society doesn’t force them into it, because plenty of gay people don’t do that.
The problem is making one aspect of yourself your entire identity, which isn’t unique to gay people. Vegans, vape bros, car guys, weed smokers, etc. have people who are guilty of it too. And those people are annoying as hell regardless of what their fixation is.
…ok? Yes, a minority of gay people are very loud about it and annoy a lot of people. Turing wasn’t one of them, and this meme suggests that all gay men are entirely focused on that aspect of their lives. That’s the homophobic part.
This meme doesn’t suggest that at all.
The Turing Test is innately arbitrary. “Real” AI can fail the Turing Test for a sufficiently skeptical test taker. Humans can fail the test. Meanwhile, we had very simple chat bots that passed the Turing Test as early as the 1970s.
I would say that “AI Slop” as a pejorative illustrates a sizeable portion of the public aren’t yet fooled. At the same time…
Some people are more gullible than others.
I think they key thing is, actual Intelligence (in whatever form) must be able to pass. However, this is not sufficient to prove they are intelligent. It’s only a necessary condition. If it fails we know for sure it isn’t intelligent. If it passes we don’t know either way.
When Turing proposed the test, he was talking philosophically about whether machines can think. He observed that we are not likely to agree on what “thinking” means. So we cannot simply test if a machine does that.
He proposed that we might instead agree that some task requires thinking. If a machine can perform that task, then the machine can think. Turing told of a three-person party game called the “imitation game”, in which an interrogator asks questions of a man and a woman in another room in order to determine the correct sex of the two players.
It’s very rational, very scientific. In the words of William James: "A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all."
In light of his sexuality, It’s interesting that he chose that game. Looking at the transgender issue today, I think it’s a given that he wouldn’t have chosen that example now. Or believed that people are rational enough to be swayed by facts and logic.
It’s very rational, very scientific.
It’s a simple heuristic based on an 80 year old party game. You can argue it is scientific as an empirical methodology, but it isn’t objective in analysis.
Or believed that people are rational enough to be swayed by facts and logic.
I don’t know how you get a “fact” out of the imitation game. If anything, the game exposes the subjectivity of the subject being analyzed. You can apply logic based on certain axioms, but what are the axioms upon which the definition of “thinking” (or “gender”) are built?
The former, at the very least, is a complex philosophical snarl that could have a tangible answer. The latter is a muddled interpretation of biological sex and social norms, with the social norms taking much higher precedence.
But a “pass” on either one is ultimately rooted in the savvy of the listener not the objective reality of the speakers. Talking about facts and logic in the imitation game is like talking about facts and logic in a poker game. At some point, you’re just going to have to guess based on incomplete information. That doesn’t mean a bluff is the same as a winning hand.
I wasn’t clear enough. Turing was wondering if machines can think. But there is no sufficiently clear definition of the word “thinking” that could be used to answer the question.
If you want to know if LLMs are AI, you can just look up the definition of AI and check if LLMs meet the criteria. You cannot do that to answer if they are thinking.
So let’s take a task, which we agree takes thinking, and see if a machine can do it as well as a human. If it can, then the machine must be able to think. That’s how you think as a scientist.
The test itself is similar to modern, placebo-controlled medical trials. That was not SOTA at the time, showing how clear thinking he was. Perhaps the WP entry on RCTs helps to understand how logic and reason may be applied in the face of uncertainty.
But of course the test revolves around the definition of a word. Such definitions are fundamentally arbitrary. That means that the test itself is arbitrary. Science is rarely concerned with colloquial definitions. Usually you come up with some sort of operational definition that you use for the purpose of inquiry. The only question is, if that definition is useful.
Slop generally should be seen as negative. It lacks novelty, and relies on blending old concepts, while entirely avoiding exploration and novelty. Although people have such poor understanding of both creativity and intelligence that the dialogue that gets socialized around AI is pretty unhinged. Copyright is just a system altered so that old money oligarchs can hoard “human software” under the guise of empowering creators. This leads to things like the tumblr “you stole my style” wars. And now being a “real” artist means being an AI slop style intern for Disney types. Good art such companies make are due to the intern artists, DESPITE the corporate influence, but it’s always incentivized to be enshittified by the active corporate process.
Turing was trying to show many aspects of intelligence. Michael Levin from Tufts university is carrying on Turing’s work in morphogenesis, which is showing how concepts built in counterfactual spaces are used in a systems actively updating as they grow into new eco-niches. This lets you feel out the new space, even in abstract conceptual spaces that are detached from your sensory signals. This let’s you build abstract yet useful patterns depending on what parts of reality seem important for your type of system. Rudimentary eyes might not comprehend the sun, but it can use it as a binary gate for an internal mechanism to activate, enabling survival tools that rely on detecting day/night, even if those concepts aren’t comprehended in the heuristic. You build robustness through scale and diverse means to build perspective and weighting active Bayesian predictive systems on top of, inside, and around each other.
LLMs don’t have the active updating, so can’t grow into novel spaces, which is important.
They however are great at certain impulse probabilistic decision making, not unlike our ability to effortlessly spew coherent combinations if words, although we need another system to pay attention and halt that process when it makes mistakes, and also to direct salience. When you don’t add deeper novel patterns, but just the facade of patterns you’ve seen, you often get something that likes like generative slop, especially if you’re familiar with the deeper meaning that’s being inappropriately usurped to signal a fake competence. Like when AI mostly gets what a hand is, but easily gets confused due to a lack of robustness or ability to recognize what is actually wrong with an extra few fingers. When our own robust “checks” fail, we might start hearing voices that aren’t consistent with reality, as one mis-weighted system projects into another. Confabulation is a big part of intelligence, although its not inherently hallucinatory.
LLMs are definitely a part of human style intelligence. That’s why Geoffrey Hinton talks about how our brains “ping.” turing has an amazing understanding of intelligence, especially for his time. Intelligence is also many things, as by its very nature is a growing grab bag if heuristics to call on or balance on. As hinton suggests, the layman comprehension of intelligence is flat earth level of misrepresented.
I think if Turing were alive he’d be in love with current academic dialogues, and he’d probably be a furry.
I think if Turing were alive he’d be in love with current academic dialogues, and he’d probably be a furry.
This is the best sentence I have wholeheartedly agreed with all year.
Hard to image a 114 year old Allen Turing not being a shameless geek for modern computer technology. Although, inter-generational attitudes among LGBTQ being what they are, I suspect we’d get a 4000 word easy in The Guardian about how the New Gays Are Doing It Wrong.
