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

[Rakesh Biswas]

Thanks Jill,

For sharing this very interesting email.

My attention was drawn to one particular line and I quote,

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.

Unquote


Turing never proposed a test in which a computer pretends to be human.

Turing proposed an imitation game in which a man and a computer compete in
pretending to be a woman and I wonder if that can be played out ?

Let's say all the others receiving your email here keep trying to figure
out if your email is from Jill or Jack or a genderless AI emailbot? 😃

Below is a link to more food for thought around the imitation game :

https://www.popsci.com/blog-network/zero-moment/lie-lady-profoundly-weird-gender-specific-roots-turing-test/

best,

rb


On Fri, Feb 10, 2023, 2:54 AM Jill Walker Rettberg via Air-L <
air-l at listserv.aoir.org> wrote:

> 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
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