I don't think "intelligence" needs to carry all the intrigue and woo of related words like "consciousness" or "creative." If we just use "intelligence" to mean "the ability of a system to solve problems that are new to the system," that pretty much matches the dictionary definition and normal usage of the term. We don't need to touch messy questions like "is there something it's like to be a bat" to conclude that bats exhibit intelligence when they navigate long distances and hunt for food.

I'm not exactly that you mean by "new to the system", but it seems to me that that definition makes a calculator intelligent, which I can't agree with.

It's a continuum, and things very low on the intelligence continuum might not be referred to as intelligent in everyday usage. But many calculators are Turing complete and can thus clearly perform computations that I would consider intelligent. The basic algorithms used by simple calculators to perform arithmetic would be extremely low on the intelligent continuum.

Intelligence isn't a binary property. Is it really a problem to say that a calculator has some intelligence? That it's more intelligent than e.g. a rock?

I agree, but it's clear most people need a definition of intelligence that (1) they qualify for and (2) nothing/no one they don't like qualifies for. And they'll keep redefining intelligence until they satisfy both criteria.

> But the consistent trend of the last couple decades (arguably since Turing's time) seems to be that any time a computer reaches our definition of intelligence we decide that that was a flawed definition

I do recall a couple of decades ago, when the Turing test was discussed as the big goal that seemed so far away. Then LLMs arguably did pass the test, and no one cared about the test anymore.

It hasn’t been passed and no one cares about it because it’s basically an end goal. No lab can hit it so they can’t juice the crazy Turing benchmark 3000 for marketing.

If someone sat me down today with an LLM and a human and both were trying to prove to me they were human, and I can have conversations of arbitrary length, I’d get it right every time.

The test was not "after thousands of hours of conversing with them, knowing they're AI, THEN see if you can tell them apart blindly." Were 2010 you to be in a real turing test with an arbitrary erudite human and a 2026 frontier LLM, not knowing LLMs existed, you'd probably struggle

Have you seen how many people talk to bots these days thinking is a real person. Or that are even in a relationship with them or friends.

Sometimes I wonder if LLMs are just revealing a section of the population with untreated mental illness or if LLMs are actively exacerbating mental illness.

We might eventually regret exposing the general population to such a new technology without almost any safeguards.

So? The people who can do it prove it can be done - the people who can't don't prove the opposite. Might as well claim all math is wrong because most people don't understand it.

Have you seen how many people form one-sided bonds with stars that don’t know they exist? Lonely people suspend disbelief to find some comfort. It’s not proof that the chatbot is indistinguishable from a human companion.

Okay, but the same could have been said about ELIZA.

This is always the most silly argument. The original test was ambiguous but for sure the human was trying to prove themselves human.

So the first thing they’d do is tell me LLMs exist and the other thing is an LLM. Obviously a true human level ai could explain that away as a fabrication to trick me. I don’t think an LLM could do even this!

Turings whole point was that through the medium of text along if the human and machine were indistinguishable then that was true intelligence. So yes conversations of arbitrary length are allowed (needed).

> It hasn’t been passed

https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674

From the abstract: "When prompted to adopt a humanlike persona, GPT-4.5 was judged to be the human 73% of the time: significantly more often than interrogators selected the real human participant. LLaMa-3.1, with the same prompt, was judged to be the human 56% of the time"

Low n, time bound, not reproduced. And look at their example conversations…

And people forget that sometimes humans message twice. An LLM can only respond. So it immediately fails here in a true Turing test. (You could loop the LLM but then I expect even more immediately obvious bot behaviour).

> Low n

Are you serious? From the paper:

> We recruited 126 participants from the UCSD psychology undergraduate subject pool and 158 participants from Prolific (Prolific, 2025).

Each human participated in 8 rounds.

> time bound

The time bound of 5 minutes was suggested by Turing himself in his original paper.

> not reproduced

It was reproduced across two populations within the paper.

> And look at their example conversations

This is irrelevant.

A paper can’t reproduce its self. And he didn’t formulate the test with a 5 minute bound he just predicted that by the year 2000 that within 5 minutes an average interrogator would have a sub 70% chance of guessing correctly.

And it’s all irrelevant. If one human on earth can consistently get it right then it hasn’t been passed since clearly that human can somehow determine between them (whereas no one would ever be able to determine between a true “human intelligence” by definition).

And as it stands almost everyone could tell between them when allowed to discuss whatever they want for any length of time.

The fact these researchers have to keep adding bounds shows it hasn’t been passed. If we are arguing over technicalities maybe it isn’t as obviously intelligent as claimed!

> And he didn’t formulate the test with a 5 minute bound he just predicted that by the year 2000 that within 5 minutes an average interrogator would have a sub 70% chance of guessing correctly.

Right, the test duration was left unspecified. This means any duration is acceptable. Including, for example, the only duration actually mentioned by Turing himself in his paper. Or do you have a more authoritative source on which durations are acceptable?

> If one human on earth can consistently get it right then it hasn’t been passed

Says who? Not Turing. Probably he didn't say that because it would make the test both impractical and overly conservative.

> The fact these researchers have to keep adding bounds

What "bounds"?

The speed of the goalposts here is just amazing.

I thought the same then. But the funny thing is that today, it has become a lot easier to recognize the frontier models as not human. All the load bearing and not x but y, etc… weird

This is a tell of LLMs but it's not universal. I use ChatGPT extensively and I don't often get obvious nonsense any more.

I'd figure out that it's an LLM because it's effectively superhuman. Taking that away I'm not so sure I'd be able to tell

The ultimate tell is still the sycophancy. You agree with the suggestion output by the LLM but if it detects even a slight pushback it will completely reverse the previous suggestion. Only way to make it more obvious would be to have the LLM grovel and beg.

If these things have consciousness then we are committing sadism on a massive scale.

It feels like it's getting better at that too. It will push back against obvious nonsense a lot stronger. But you are right that it holds opinions quite a bit less strenuously than humans.

> If intelligence requires sentience for you, then ... well, I don't think we really agree what that is either, never mind how to measure it. But LLMs certainly don't have it right now

Probably. Hopefully.

> But LLMs certainly don't have it right now

Why are you so sure of that? If you say yourself that we can't agree on what it is, and have no trusted measurement tools for it.

LLM sentience is firmly in the realm of "maybe".

> But the consistent trend of the last couple decades (arguably since Turing's time) seems to be that any time a computer reaches our definition of intelligence we decide that that was a flawed definition

I think the mistake here is the notion that there was a definition of intelligence. Or at least a consensus on that definition. Just because compsci nerds of the day thought the Turing test was the final threshold before “real” AI, doesn’t mean philosophers, psychologists and everyone else bought into it. And when we arrived and it turns out to be underwhelming it’s because the compsci nerds made the same mistake they always make: that their models truly encompass all the dense complexity of the real world.