[Air-L] Newspaper articles about AI in The Times in 1949

[Jill Walker Rettberg]

I’m hoping somebody here subscribes to The Times (in the UK) and is willing to search The Times’s online archives for me to find two articles related to Alan Turing and AI that I am insanely curious to read, because they seem extremely pertinent to current debates about ChatGPT. Probably many insitutions in the UK would also subscribe to Gale (https://www.gale.com/intl/c/the-times-digital-archive) which also has The Times’s archives.

The articles are:

• "No mind for mechanical man", 10 June 1949, p. 2
This is apparently a report from a symposium where Jefferson claimed that a computer would need to create and feel art in order to be intelligent.

• A response from Turing on June 11, 1949
I don’t know the title of this article but it was published the following day, and a journalist interviewed Turing about the previous day’s report. Turing said "I do not think you can even draw the line about sonnets, though the comparison is perhaps a little bit unfair because a sonnet written by a machine will be better appreciated by another machine."

These two articles are cited in lots of articles online but I can’t find the originals anywhere. Even my university library has given up, which kind of shocks me. Surely old NEWSPAPERS shouldn’t be that hard to get? Did all the libraries throw out their microfiches and now The Times and Gale have monopolies? Like Getty digitized all those public domain images and film reels and locks them up behind paywalls?

Shouldn’t a newspaper article published 73 years ago be in the public domain by now, anyway?

I read about the newspaper articles in this paper, which I very much enjoyed:

Gonçalves, Bernardo. 2022. “Can Machines Think? The Controversy That Led to the Turing Test.” __AI & SOCIETY__, January. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01318-6.

Gonçalves argues that Turing switched from designing programs to beat a human at chess to arguing that language models (like, uh, GPT) are a better test of “intelligence” because Jefferson said chess is just rule-based therefore easy, and you need ART to prove intelligence. Gonçalves also explains the Turing test’s weird gender framework by Turing addressing Jefferson’s idea that “another animal of the same species wanting to mate with a mechanical creature” would be a good test of “passing” as not mechanical.

Thank you so much!

Jill