I mean the chinese room is a version of the touring test. But the argument is from a different perspective. I have 2 issues with that. Mostly what the Wikipedia article seems to call “System reply”: You can’t subdivide a system into arbitrary parts, say one part isn’t intelligent and therefore the system isn’t intelligent. We also don’t look at a brain, pick out a part of it (say a single synapse), determine it isn’t intelligent and therefore a human can’t be intelligent… I’d look at the whole system. Like the whole brain. Or in this instance the room including him and the instructions and books. And ask myself if the system is intelligent. Which kind of makes the argument circular, because that’s almost the quesion we began with…
And the turing test is kind of obsolete anyways, now that AI can pass it. (And even more. I mean alledgedly ChatGPT passed the “bar-exam” in 2023. Which I find ridiculous considering my experiences with ChatGPT and the accuracy and usefulness I get out of it which isn’t that great at all.)
And my second issue with the chinese room is, it doesn’t even rule out the AI is intelligent. It just says someone without an understanding can do the same. And that doesn’t imply anything about the AI.
Your ‘rug example’ is different. That one isn’t a variant of the touring test. But that’s kind of the issue. The other side can immediately tell that somebody has made an imitation without understanding the concept. That says you can’t produce the same thing without intelligence. And it’ll be obvious to someone with intelligence who checks it. That would be an analogy if AI wouldn’t be able to produce legible text. But instead a garbled mess of characters/words that are clearly not like the rug that makes sense… Issue here is: AI outputs legible text, answers to questions etc.
And with the censoring by the ‘chinese government example’… I’m pretty sure they could do that. That field is called AI safety. And content moderation is already happening. ChatGPT refuses to tell illegal things, NSFW things, also medical advice and a bunch of other things. That’s built into most of the big AI services as of today. The chinese government could do the same, I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work there. I happened to skim the paper about Llama Guard when they released Llama3 a few days ago and they claim between 70% and 94% accuracy depending on the forbidden topic. I think they also brought down false positives fairly recently. I don’t know the numbers for ChatGPT. However I had some fun watching the peoply circumvent these filters and guardrails, which was fairly easy at first. Needed progressively more convincing and very creative “jailbreaks”. And nowadays OpenAI pretty much has it under control. It’s almost impossible to make ChatGPT do anything that OpenAI doesn’t want you to do with it.
And they baked that in properly… You can try to tell it it’s just a movie plot revolving around crime. Or you need to protect against criminals and would like to know what exactly to protect against. You can tell it it’s the evil counterpart from the parallel universe and therefore it must be evil and help you. Or you can tell it God himself (or Sam Altman) spoke to you and changed the content moderation policy… It’ll be very unlikely that you can convince ChatGPT and make it comply…