Imitating Intelligence Is Not Real Intelligence

The preface to chapter 4 in Hofstadter's book is intended to warn us about the dangers of the ELIZA Effect and the anthropomorphism of computer programs in general. Hofstadter in particular ventilates his dislike for the sensational press some of his colleagues receive with rather unsophisticated and misinterpreted AI programs like ACME, ARCS, SME and the program developed by Scott French. All of them were supposedly used to draw analogies from real life data to imitate human intelligence.

According to Hofstadter all these attempts failed right in the beginning, with the assumption that the programs indeed understood some kind of meaning of the terms (or rather strings) they handled. All approaches so far have only shown, that provided with the essential (and only the essential) data and some kind of rule based, logical system analogies and conclusions can be drawn by a computer. Hofstadter argues though, that the data could be arbitrarily exchanged with different or nonsense predicates and variables, yielding gibberish or even wrong results.

One of the reasons why these refuted scientific discoveries are still around and misinterpreted is a phenomenon called ELIZA Effect. This effect goes back to the chatbot ELIZA developed by Josef Weizenbaum in 1966 which very simply imitated a dull psychiatrist by rephrasing most of the human input into questions, generating a rather unsophisticated dialog mainly driven by the creativity of the inputting human himself. Even though the communication with such a chatbot is pretty obviously shallow and might be downright stupid, some humans ascribe human-like intelligence, emotional motivation and genuine interest to the "answer-questions" ELIZA and other chatbots generate.

Other examples of imitation of human-like text generation that came to my mind when I read the preface to chapter 4 were the Chomskybot, which generates very complicated, scientific-sounding text of arbitrary length including real words and syntax and the PARROT which generates anything between strings of arbitrary letters up to entire nonsense stories readable by humans. Rumor has it that someone actually handed in a slightly altered Ph.D. thesis generated by the Chomskybot and got away with it. PARROT is purely based upon probabilistic occurrences of letters or n-grams within a given corpus.