Can AI and humans genuinely communicate?

TL;DR

The paper proposes a 'mental-behavioral methodology' to assess if AI and humans can genuinely communicate, focusing on behavioral tests rather than understanding AI's internal workings.

Contribution

It introduces a new methodology for evaluating genuine communication between AI and humans based on behavioral criteria, bypassing the need to understand AI internals.

Findings

The methodology provides a practical framework for testing AI-human communication.

It emphasizes behavioral equivalence over internal interpretability.

The approach is applicable regardless of AI's black-box nature.

Abstract

Can AI and humans genuinely communicate? In this article, after giving some background and motivating my proposal (sections 1 to 3), I explore a way to answer this question that I call the "mental-behavioral methodology" (sections 4 and 5). This methodology follows the following three steps: First, spell out what mental capacities are sufficient for human communication (as opposed to communication more generally). Second, spell out the experimental paradigms required to test whether a behavior exhibits these capacities. Third, apply or adapt these paradigms to test whether an AI displays the relevant behaviors. If the first two steps are successfully completed, and if the AI passes the tests with human-like results, this constitutes evidence that this AI and humans can genuinely communicate. This mental-behavioral methodology has the advantage that we don't need to understand the workings of black-box algorithms, such as standard deep neural networks. This is comparable to the fact that we don't need to understand how human brains work to know that humans can genuinely communicate. This methodology also has its disadvantages and I will discuss some of them (section 6).