There's an element of behaviorism which stretches back to Descartes - how can you know that I exist? That I think? You can only observe through my behavior; that my behavior mimics yours.
How then can we judge machines any other way?
A better "Turing test" proposed a few years ago was, "develop a team of robots that play soccer so well they can win the World Cup". While not the best possible driver of AI research, the quest for such a goal would still drive AI research orders or magnitude better than "trick random people to mistake a chatbot for a human".
How is this any better that "build a bot that can beat Chess Masters" ?? Well, apart from the part where this includes multiple agents, and swarm robotics, etc. But frankly, setting a game as a bar actually covers relatively less scope in my opinion. Conversational bot actually does cover a LOT of scope if you think about all the possible ways the conversation can be taken. In fact, we as humans use conversation to judge other humans' intelligence as well. E.g. job interviews.
Though perhaps an advanced turing test could include performance in a variety of social situations like...
- convince employers to hire you, - Convince a girl to go out with you - Convince a customer to buy something - Debates... (Presidential debates by AI would be interesting)
However, in this case, "Eugene" claimed English as his second language, which seems as close to cheating as it gets.
One of the ironies of AI is that trivial tasks for humans like recognizing a soccer ball, moving around without falling over, or, yes, holding a conversation are very, very difficult while difficult tasks, like playing chess or finding the best route on a map, are relatively trivial.
But look at me, ascribing thoughts and intentions on a black box that I cannot be sure really exists.
Here's a fun idea for several intelligence tests we can call the VLM tests that have nothing to do with two way conversation like the Turing test.
Given "a machine intelligence" spin up a couple million of them in a "fun" simulation environment and see how much thermodynamic dis-equilibrium they generate by whatever social interaction they see fit to apply to each other. Is it as interesting (aka thermodynamic dis-equilibrium) as a GoL or a real world anthill or a Dwarf Fortress or a Google Earth? Is their simulated culture as interesting to read as HN, or as dumb as youtube comments (which used to be the gold standard of dumbness in social media)
Assuming you can crack the literary code (if any exists) another game to play is extract the meme-flow of a culture of AI vs a culture of 4chan and vote for whichever meme came from a more intelligent group. This is Turing-ish WRT human observers majority vote and such, but is completely non-interactive, merely humans, or even trained sociologists, trying to figure out given two memes which is more intelligent.
Getting out the Sherlock Holmes hat, its possible to determine if an artifact came from an intelligence without talking to the intelligence for awhile. I suspect archeologists have really fun debates on this topic. Is this a stone hammer or merely a peculiar river rock, etc.
A researcher claiming to have passed the Turing test instantly discredits himself as a prestidigitator looking for PR buzz. The present article is a textbook example of this.
As a side note, if you are focusing on disembodied, language-based human-like intelligence, then the paradigm you operate in is many decades behind. The Turing test was conceived at a time when the notion of thinking machines had just started to emerge --a very different time from today, where we have 60 years of AI research behind us. The Turing test has been irrelevant for longer than most AI researchers have been alive. I have never seen it used for anything else than smoke-and-mirrors PR operations.