Have you seen the 2014 film The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, the brilliant WWII code breaker who built a mathematical machine to crack the German code?
In 1950, Turing posed what has become known as the Turing Test, which he called the Imitation Game. It posited that if a computer could sufficiently imitate human conversation and thought, it could think on its own. It took over 70 years, but AI finally passed the Turing Test in 2023.
Check out the following articles to learn more about Turing's influence on the assessment of AI and future trajectories of the technology and the current problem of assessment. Julia Angwin also reminds us that the companies behind A.I. platforms are profit-driven, which can result in overpromising on what their products can deliver. This becomes clearer when their products are placed under expert review. Many current and former employees at companies like OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft have voiced concerns about safety and the lack of government regulation in the industry.
The Imitation Game
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The 2013 movie Her is an example of how a fictionalized imagining of A.I. companionship is influencing the development of modern A.I. The reality of chatbot companions such as Character.AI offer a grim reality check.
Her
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Learn about the the library that is the "architectural centerpiece of the offices of OpenAI," and how OpenAI employees find it to be a place of inspiration for quiet work or breaks, full of their suggested books, while it also stands as a symbol of the controversy over whether the use of copyrighted books and other publications to train the company's AI platform ChatGPT was an appropriate application of fair use.
Designed to be a symbol of human creativity and evoke the ethos of academia with Oriental rugs and modern furniture and fixtures, it looks like a sleek reimagining of the elegant reading rooms designed by the Victorians, like the Rose Reading Room at the New York Public Library and the Green Library at Stanford University.
It was important to Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, to create this space at OpenAI's headquarters because his "dining room and living room at home is inside a library--floor-to-ceiling books all the way around...There is something about sitting in the middle of knowledge on the shelves at vast scale that I find interesting." In the midst of ever-changing digital access to knowledge, the print word still holds unique sway. I even spied some of PTC's print titles on OpenAI's shelves, like Diana Gabaldon's Outlander books, and J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Two Towers.
