Is the Turing Test Still the Best Way to Tell Machines and Humans Apart?

In 1950, Alan Turing proposed his famous test as a measure of intelligence. A human judge would chat through text with both a person and a machine. If the judge couldn’t spot the difference, the machine earned the label of intelligent.

For years, this imitation game shaped public benchmarks for AI. Today, however, we have AI systems like GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini that can carry on shockingly fluent conversations. They often pass as human to untrained observers, easily clearing the linguistic bar set by Turing.

Yet many researchers argue that this isn’t enough. A machine might appear to understand language, while fundamentally lacking true comprehension.​

The Turing Test, brilliant as it was, never really measured whether the AI grasps meaning. It only measured if it could mimic the surface behavior of understanding. Early AI critics doubted a computer could ever handle ...