Forget the Turing Test: Here's How We Could Actually Measure AI

A chatbot pretending to be a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy made waves last weekend when its programmers announced that it had passed the Turing test. But the judges of this test were apparently easily fooled, because any cursory exchange with'Eugene Goosterman' reveals the machine inside the ghost. Maybe the time has come, 60 years after Alan Turing's death, to discard the idea that imitating human conversation is a good test of artificial intelligence. "I start my Cognitive Science class with a slide titled'Artificial Stupidity,'" said Noah Goodman, director of the computation and cognition lab at Stanford University. "People have made progress on the Turing test by making chatbots quirkier and stupider."