“The public knows the test of course, but the AI community wishes it would go away; we all know that beating that test isn’t meaningful.”
Our reading, the sentence that was checked:
The AI community wishes the Turing Test would go away, and its members all know that beating the test is not meaningful.
Assessment: Unresolved Evidence as of
Where and when Gary Marcus wrote it
Marcus on AI, Nonsense on Stilts, paragraph 42.
- Said
- Source observed
- live page, full text, public
- Evidence as of
- the cutoff for this assessment
- Assessment recorded
- assessment marcus-nonsense-on-stilts-4f4543-a1
We recorded 12 claims from this post. See every claim from this post.
The wording above is the version this site observed on 2026-10-29. The source may have been edited after 2022-06-12. This page does not claim the wording was captured then.
What the claim commits to
- Kind
- Observation
- Deadline, as the speaker wrote it
- None stated. This site does not add one.
- Deadline state when assessed
- No horizon
- Deadline state on 2026-10-29
- No horizon (the release’s reference date)
Conditions
- the AI community, as opposed to the public (scope, stated by the speaker)
From the speaker
- the AI community wishes it would go away
- we all know
- beating that test isn’t meaningful
Our interpretation
- The test is the conversational Turing Test discussed in the surrounding passage.
- Read 'we all' as a claim of broad field consensus, rather than a literal claim about every individual.
- Meaningful refers to passing the test as a measure of AI progress. The claim also asserts a community preference to abandon it.
- Use June 1 through June 12, 2022, for the ongoing community attitude described at publication.
- The reference to the AI community rather than the public specifies the population; it is not a conditional forecast.
Counts as supported if: Representative evidence establishes both broad rejection of passing the conversational Turing Test as meaningful evidence of AI progress and a broad preference to abandon it.
Counts as contradicted if: Evidence establishes a substantial active constituency in the AI community that assigns the test meaningful value or wants to retain it. Isolated disagreement does not alone disprove the ordinary consensus reading.
Retrospective: these criteria were written after the outcome was public.
Current assessment
Was it true for the period described?
Outcome: Unresolved
The record was checked, and the evidence available by the cutoff does not settle it.
Scored on a plain reading. The speaker named no measure for this claim, so it was judged on the reading an informed reader would take, stated below under our interpretation. Both reviews had to find that reading fair.
- Evidence as of
- Deadline state when assessed
- No horizon
- Assessment recorded
- Policy version
- 2026-10-28.7
Rationale
The verified scholarly record contains both criticism and continuing endorsement of the Turing Test. It does not establish a June 2022 field-wide wish to abandon it, or the prevalence of views about its significance. A literal unanimity reading faces documented dissent, but that alone does not settle the fairer reading as a broad-consensus claim.
Limitations
- The usable scholarly overview predates the target period.
- Criticism of the test's limitations is not equivalent to believing it has no value.
- Later Turing-test research was not used to infer earlier community attitudes.
Evidence (1 item)
Context only: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
continue to endorse The Turing Test.
Why it matters here: The overview documents both criticism and continuing defense, including work by Neufeld and Finnestad. It cautions against literal unanimity but does not measure the size of either constituency in June 2022.
- Publisher
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Kind of source
- Secondary summary
- Describes events of
- Public from
What would settle it
Representative contemporaneous evidence covering both perceived benchmark value and willingness to retain or abandon the test.
Where it was said (1)
Said once in the sources this register covers.
: Marcus on AI, Nonsense on Stilts
The public knows the test of course, but the AI community wishes it would go away; we all know that beating that test isn’t meaningful.
- Where
- paragraph 42
- Published
- 2022-06-12
- Source observed
- , live page
- Access
- full text, public
History
Assessment versions
- Assessment marcus-nonsense-on-stilts-4f4543-a1: Current. Outcome: Unresolved. Evidence as of 2026-10-28. Public date not recorded.
Recorded events
Assessment publishedBy this site
First assessment published after both reviews and the final-text check passed.