A couple of weeks ago, the media space went into overdrive after a new study found that of four Large Language Models subjected to the Turing test, ChatGPT had passed it. Reporting highlights included headlines that the line between humans and machines was "blurring", claims that robots were now as smart as humans, and dystopian warnings that 1984's The Terminator would become reality soon.

What most of the reporting failed to provide the appropriate context or "so what?", instead allowing readers to fill in the gaps themselves (if not being explicitly misleading, like comparing the result to the dawn of Terminator). Are we now closer than ever to artificial general intelligence? Maybe. But not really.

While most of us have heard of the Turing test and know that it's significant, that's the limit of our knowledge. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and the logical progression is that the Turing test is important, therefore passing it must also be important.

As Zena Assaad in The Conversation , Darren Orf in Popular Mechanics and others point out, however, the Turing test, aside from being highly contentious, is pretty mundane. It's a test to see if someone can distinguish a machine from a human. If they can't, it just as likely means humans are more easily fooled than we might otherwise like to think. Or that humans are more easily mimicked that previously thought.

Compelling headlines; but not quite accurate, and still a long way to go.

There is an equally scary narrative in the student recruitment space that admissions officers and broadly all university student recruitment functions will soon be replaced by AI. But can AI even do that yet? And if it can, are we creating a fast lane for students to come to our institutions, or are we making things even more complicated than before?