Astral Codex Ten

ELIZA

3 min read

ELIZA

Article

ELIZA is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 13, 2022 and September 18, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “The first time was in 1966, when ELIZA passed the Turing test. ELIZA was a chatbot”; “When the program ELIZA passed the Turing test”; “ELIZA was already fooling people in 1964”. It most often appears alongside Turing test, AIDER, Ajeya Cotra.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: May 13, 2022
  • Last seen: September 18, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Your Book Review: Consciousness And The Brain
May 13, 2022 · Original source
We know this because it happened several times. The first time was in 1966, when ELIZA passed the Turing test. ELIZA was a chatbot who could fool some people to believe that they talk with a real human. Before ELIZA, people assumed that only an intelligent machine could do that, but it just turned out that it is really easy to fool others. Other tests for intelligence were playing chess, playing a whole variety of games, or recognizing cat images. Machines can do all this by now, and this is awesome. And yet, every success sparked new disappointment, because we didn't find any magic ingredient, some quality that would make a difference between intelligent and non-intelligent. When the groundbreaking GPT-3 and DALL-E suddenly could write news articles or poetry, or could dream up snails made of harp... the main improvement was that they used more raw computation power than the previous versions.
Inline links: a whole variety of games, GPT-3, DALL-E, snails made of harp
Do you feel disappointed by the book? At least some people did. When the program ELIZA passed the Turing test, a common reaction was “This is not what we had meant”. Some reactions to this book were similar. Dehaene’s concept of consciousness is much more mundane than the lofty associations that we commonly attach to the word consciousness. But if we actually want to nail it down and get a more substantial definition than “whatever elevates me above mere animal”, then “the thing that happens during conscious perceptions and does not happen during unconscious perceptions” sounds pretty convincing to me.
Sakana, Strawberry, and Scary AI
September 18, 2024 · Original source
(and “a year or two from now” is being generous - a dumb chatbot passed a supposedly-official-albeit-stupid Turing Test attempt in 2014, and ELIZA was already fooling people in 1964.)
Inline links: passed, ELIZA
First, maybe we’ve learned that it’s unexpectedly easy to mimic intelligence without having it. This seems closest to ELIZA, which was obviously a cheap trick.
Like ELIZA making conversation, Deep Blue playing chess, or GPT-4 writing poetry, all of this is boring.