I sat the All Souls exam, taking the philosophy specialist papers, though I'm a math/physics/ML guy. It was a lot of fun, I really appreciate that there's somewhere in the world where these kinds of questions are asked in a formal setting. My questions/answers are written up in brief here [1]
* Oops, they link to my post at the bottom. Sorry for the redundancy.
2 hours ago [-]
munchler 1 hours ago [-]
A few years ago, the Turing Test was universally seen as sufficient for identifying intelligence. Now we’re scouring the planet for obscure tests to make us feel superior again. One can argue that the Turing Test was not actually adequate for this purpose, but we should at least admit how far we have shifted the goalposts since then.
OtherShrezzing 23 minutes ago [-]
I don't think the Turing Test, in its strictest terms, is currently defeated by LLM based AIs. The original paper puts forward that:
>The object of the game for the third [human] player (B) is to help the interrogator. The best strategy for her is probably to give truthful answers. She can add such things as "I am the woman, don't listen to him!" to her answers, but it will avail nothing as the man can make similar remarks.
Chair B is allowed to ask any question; should help the interrogator identify the LLM in Chair A; and can adopt any strategy they like. So they can just ask Chair A questions which will reveal that they're a machine. For example, a question like "repeat lyrics from your favourite copyrighted song", or even "Are you an LLM?".
Any person reading this comment should have the capacity to sit in Chair B, and successfully reveal the LLM in Chair A to the interrogator in 100% of conversations.
altruios 38 minutes ago [-]
I have trouble reconciling this point with the known phenomenon of hallucinations.
I would suppose the correct test is an 'infinite' Turing test, which after a long enough conversation, LLM's invariably do not pass, as they eventually degrade.
I think a better measure for the binary answer of "have they passed the Turing test?" is the metric of 'For how long do they continue to pass the Turing test?"...
This ignores such ideas of probing the LLM's weak spots. Since they do not 'see' their input as characters, and instead as tokens, counting letters in words, or specifics about those sub-token division provides a shortcut (for now) to failing the Turing test.
But the above approach is not in the spirit of the Turing test, as that only points out a blind spot in their perception, like how a human would have to guess a bit at what things would look like if UV and infrared were added to our visual field... sure we could reason about it, but we wouldn't actually perceive those wavelengths, so we could make mistakes about that qualia. And it would say nothing of our ability to think if we could not perceive those wavelengths, even if 'more-seeing' entities judged us as inferior for it...
rurp 31 minutes ago [-]
I think the article gives a much more plausible explanation for the demise of the Turing Test: the jagged frontier. In the past being able to write convincingly well seemed like a good overall proxy for cognitive ability. It turns out LLMs are excellent at spitting out reasonable sounding text, and great at producing certain types of writing, but are still terrible at many writing tasks that rely on cognitive ability.
Humans don't need to cast about for obscure cases where they are smarter than an LLM, there are an endless supply of examples. It's simply the case that the Turing Test tells us very little about the relative strengths and weaknesses of the current AI capabilities.
layer8 27 minutes ago [-]
The article isn’t really about intelligence, but about originality and creativity in writing.
dmurray 39 minutes ago [-]
The LLM examples for "Water" surely put it in the top 10% of people (let's say, of adult native English speakers who are literate by UNESCO standards). The average person can't string two written sentences together, never mind write a coherent essay "from an opinionated, individual point of view" in a single draft.
That might still make it the worst candidate in the All Souls exams, because those obviously select for people who are interested in writing essays of this sort.
But I'm also curious whether the LLM could compete given a suitable prompt. If it was told to write an idiosyncratic, opinionated essay, and perhaps given a suitable source material - "you are Harry Potter" but someone less well known but still with a million words of backstory - couldn't it do it? The chat bots we have today are bland because we value blandness. Customers are willing to pay for the inoffensive corporate style that can replace 90% of their employees at writing. Nobody is paying billions of dollars for a Montaigne or a Swift or even a Paul Graham to produce original essays.
lordnacho 2 hours ago [-]
I went to see the last Mallard Song. Just to say I went, of course. It looked like a bunch of weirdos in a courtyard to me, but it was a literally once-in-a-century event, and I was living less than a minute away, so why not?
I don't think I've ever heard of a scheduled ritual that has a longer period. You're guaranteed to never have anyone present at more than one of these, so surely many aspects of the ritual will wander quite far from the original?
As for LLMs on the All Souls test, it's predictable that it mostly whiffs. After all it takes in a diet of Reddit+Wikipedia+etc, none of which is the kind of writing they are looking for.
Reddit is a lot of crappy comments. If you have no grounding in reality (being a thing that lives in a datacentre), how are you going to curate it? Some subs are really quite good, but most are really quite bad. It's not easy to get guidance, of the kind you would get if you sat with a professor for three or four hours a week for a few years, which is what the humanities students actually do.
Wikipedia is a great reference work, but it tends to not have any of the kinds of connections you're supposed to make in these essays. It has a lot of factual stuff, so questions about Persia will look ok, like in the article. But questions that glue together ideas across areas? Nah. Even if that's in the dataset somewhere, how is the LLM supposed to know that the sort of refined writing of a cross-subject academic is the highest level of the humanities? It doesn't, so it spits out what the average Redditor might glue together from a bit of googling.
dash2 1 hours ago [-]
OK, interesting hypothesis. So, I wondered how it would do with "Why should cultural historians care about ice cores?" which indeed requires gluing together ideas across areas. I asked ChatGPT 5 on Thinking mode:
It does a pretty good job summarizing an abstruse, but known, subfield of frontier research. (So, perhaps not doing its own "gluing" of areas....) It clearly lacks "depth", in the sense of deep thinking about the why and how of this. (Many cultural historians might have reasons for deep scepticism of invasion by a bunch of quantitative data nerds, I suspect, and might be able to articulate why quite well.) It's bullet points, not an essay. I tried asking it for a 1000 word essay specifically and got:
It seems to do a good job at explaining why they should, though not in a deep essayistic style.
andy99 39 minutes ago [-]
This was good, the tldr point is LLMs suck at natural writing, particularly long form. Or more abstractly they don't have complex original ideas, so can't do anything that requires this.
It's not surprising as it's very hard to train for or benchmark.
Also should add I don't think anyone serious thinks that long form writing or ideation is what they're for - assuming an LLM would be good at this is a side effect of anthropomorphism / confusion. It doesn't mean an LLM isn't good at summarizing something or changing unstructured data into structured or all of the other "cognitive tasks" that we expect from AI.
SamBam 3 hours ago [-]
I think the implication is that to be interesting you need to write from an individual's standpoint. That's why fiction written by LLMs sounds so boring (at least right now): because you can't amalgamate all the text in the world and not sound like an average.
> ‘Oh, do let me go on,’ said Wilde, ‘I want to see how it ends.’
Not really on the topic of the FA, but I've heard a few times about the All Souls Exams and seen some sample essay prompts, and I would love to read some real essays written by test takers. Any pointers?
decimalenough 2 hours ago [-]
They're written in pencil and not returned, so nobody (except All Souls staff) has access to them.
andyjohnson0 2 hours ago [-]
> The ultimate example may be All Souls College, which has a ritual, the Mallard Song, that occurs once a century.
You can't walk for more than five minutes in the UK without tripping over some nonsense like this. History is very important, and traditon has its place, but really? As a brit I find it all kind of tediously performative sometimes.
xg15 2 hours ago [-]
Not a Brit, but Terry Pratchett's ritual of the Other Jacket told me all I need to know.
It is truly strange how my country can create a political and cultural operating system that allows this stuff to just go on and on for almost 800 years, right up to now.
xg15 1 hours ago [-]
> The King's Remembrancer swears in a jury of 26 Goldsmiths who then count, weigh and otherwise measure a sample of 88,000 gold coins produced by the Royal Mint.
I mean, you have to admire the stamina for that.
wjnc 2 hours ago [-]
People are average on average. OP is measuring LLM succes based on a super human test which most of us would likely fail. Creativity is just longer context and opinionated prompting. (For discussion purposes. I’m on 70% true.) Average Joe LLM and me are having a great time.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/oxforduni/comments/q0giir/my_all_so...
* Oops, they link to my post at the bottom. Sorry for the redundancy.
>The object of the game for the third [human] player (B) is to help the interrogator. The best strategy for her is probably to give truthful answers. She can add such things as "I am the woman, don't listen to him!" to her answers, but it will avail nothing as the man can make similar remarks.
Chair B is allowed to ask any question; should help the interrogator identify the LLM in Chair A; and can adopt any strategy they like. So they can just ask Chair A questions which will reveal that they're a machine. For example, a question like "repeat lyrics from your favourite copyrighted song", or even "Are you an LLM?".
Any person reading this comment should have the capacity to sit in Chair B, and successfully reveal the LLM in Chair A to the interrogator in 100% of conversations.
I would suppose the correct test is an 'infinite' Turing test, which after a long enough conversation, LLM's invariably do not pass, as they eventually degrade.
I think a better measure for the binary answer of "have they passed the Turing test?" is the metric of 'For how long do they continue to pass the Turing test?"...
This ignores such ideas of probing the LLM's weak spots. Since they do not 'see' their input as characters, and instead as tokens, counting letters in words, or specifics about those sub-token division provides a shortcut (for now) to failing the Turing test.
But the above approach is not in the spirit of the Turing test, as that only points out a blind spot in their perception, like how a human would have to guess a bit at what things would look like if UV and infrared were added to our visual field... sure we could reason about it, but we wouldn't actually perceive those wavelengths, so we could make mistakes about that qualia. And it would say nothing of our ability to think if we could not perceive those wavelengths, even if 'more-seeing' entities judged us as inferior for it...
Humans don't need to cast about for obscure cases where they are smarter than an LLM, there are an endless supply of examples. It's simply the case that the Turing Test tells us very little about the relative strengths and weaknesses of the current AI capabilities.
That might still make it the worst candidate in the All Souls exams, because those obviously select for people who are interested in writing essays of this sort.
But I'm also curious whether the LLM could compete given a suitable prompt. If it was told to write an idiosyncratic, opinionated essay, and perhaps given a suitable source material - "you are Harry Potter" but someone less well known but still with a million words of backstory - couldn't it do it? The chat bots we have today are bland because we value blandness. Customers are willing to pay for the inoffensive corporate style that can replace 90% of their employees at writing. Nobody is paying billions of dollars for a Montaigne or a Swift or even a Paul Graham to produce original essays.
I don't think I've ever heard of a scheduled ritual that has a longer period. You're guaranteed to never have anyone present at more than one of these, so surely many aspects of the ritual will wander quite far from the original?
As for LLMs on the All Souls test, it's predictable that it mostly whiffs. After all it takes in a diet of Reddit+Wikipedia+etc, none of which is the kind of writing they are looking for.
Reddit is a lot of crappy comments. If you have no grounding in reality (being a thing that lives in a datacentre), how are you going to curate it? Some subs are really quite good, but most are really quite bad. It's not easy to get guidance, of the kind you would get if you sat with a professor for three or four hours a week for a few years, which is what the humanities students actually do.
Wikipedia is a great reference work, but it tends to not have any of the kinds of connections you're supposed to make in these essays. It has a lot of factual stuff, so questions about Persia will look ok, like in the article. But questions that glue together ideas across areas? Nah. Even if that's in the dataset somewhere, how is the LLM supposed to know that the sort of refined writing of a cross-subject academic is the highest level of the humanities? It doesn't, so it spits out what the average Redditor might glue together from a bit of googling.
https://chatgpt.com/share/689e5361-fad8-8010-b203-f4f80d1457...
It does a pretty good job summarizing an abstruse, but known, subfield of frontier research. (So, perhaps not doing its own "gluing" of areas....) It clearly lacks "depth", in the sense of deep thinking about the why and how of this. (Many cultural historians might have reasons for deep scepticism of invasion by a bunch of quantitative data nerds, I suspect, and might be able to articulate why quite well.) It's bullet points, not an essay. I tried asking it for a 1000 word essay specifically and got:
https://chatgpt.com/share/689e5545-0688-8010-8bdf-632d3c3466...
which seems only superficially different - an essay in form, but secretly a bunch of bullet points.
For a comparison, here's a Guardian article that came up when I googled for "cultural historians ice cores":
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/20/solar-storms...
It seems to do a good job at explaining why they should, though not in a deep essayistic style.
It's not surprising as it's very hard to train for or benchmark.
Also should add I don't think anyone serious thinks that long form writing or ideation is what they're for - assuming an LLM would be good at this is a side effect of anthropomorphism / confusion. It doesn't mean an LLM isn't good at summarizing something or changing unstructured data into structured or all of the other "cognitive tasks" that we expect from AI.
> ‘Oh, do let me go on,’ said Wilde, ‘I want to see how it ends.’
Pretty great line.
You can't walk for more than five minutes in the UK without tripping over some nonsense like this. History is very important, and traditon has its place, but really? As a brit I find it all kind of tediously performative sometimes.
https://community.pearljam.com/discussion/71416/tradition-go...
See also; the King's Remembrancer and the Quit Rent Ceremony and the Trial of the Pyx:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Remembrancer
It is truly strange how my country can create a political and cultural operating system that allows this stuff to just go on and on for almost 800 years, right up to now.
I mean, you have to admire the stamina for that.