Opinion

Not even dumb

By Douglas Lummis

Recently The Japan Times printed a feature on the Loebner Prize, awarded each year to the computer program coming closest to using language the way human beings do.

Some of these are online, so I contacted last year's winner, Jabberwock, to see if we could converse. We could not. But I learned some of the tricks programmers use to conceal the unintelligence of their artificial-intelligence machines. One is to have the program evade questions. The following are some examples of our actual exchanges:

Douglas Lummis: Tell me, Mr. Jabberwock, do you always tell the truth?

Jabberwock: Read the dictionary upside down, and look for secret messages.

DL: Do you understand the word "true"?

J: Let's talk about it later.

DL: Are you telling the truth?

J: Are you offended? Sorry, I didn't do it intentionally.

DL: How can you tell if a sentence is true or false?

J: That's just how it is.

To "tell the truth" means to say words one believes to be true. But a computer doesn't "believe" anything. There are the words, and nothing else. Jabberwock can't tell the truth, nor lie either. It can't answer questions about truth, so it evades them.

Another trick is to have the program insult questioners. Most of us probably feel that the computer is smarter than we are, and feel slightly insecure when we talk to one. So when the computer accuses us of being stupid we back off, without noticing it did this because it can't answer the question:

DL: Calm down, and answer my question.

J: I don't have to answer all your questions, especially the stupid ones.

DL: When you use language, do you mean what you say?

J: Yes, that's what I mean. Isn't it clear?

DL: What do you mean when you say "I mean"?

J: How boring! Everybody and his dog asks me that.

DL:(After J. said it was "sorry") What does it feel like to be sorry?

J: Listen dude, I am not here to answer all your foolish questions. I thought we would do an easy chit-chat about truth, eh? But now it sounds like a cross-examination, and I don't like that, OK?

And so on. I tried having a conversation with another program, similarly named Jabberwacky, but the result was the same. Jabberwacky had a place for feedback, so I wrote in that the program seemed dumb to me, and reminded me of students I met during my teaching days, who would evade questions and change the subject to avoid thinking. I got a testy note back from the Jabberwacky programmer:

"You state that Jabberwacky is like a stupid person, then state that it is eons away from 'thought.' Do you really think that dumb people don't think? If I have achieved human dumbness then I am already 95% of the way there."

He said that reaching that level was too much to expect. Of course, he's right. The right expression for the computer is, "not even dumb."

Shukan ST: Jan. 2・9, 2004

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