As AI continues to advance, human-AI teams are inevitable. However, progress in AI is routinely measured in isolation, without a human in the loop. It is crucial to benchmark progress in AI, not just in isolation, but also in terms of how it translates to helping humans perform certain tasks, i.e., the performance of human-AI teams. In this work, we design a cooperative game - GuessWhich - to measure human-AI team performance in the specific context of the AI being a visual conversational agent. GuessWhich involves live interaction between the human and the AI. The AI, which we call ALICE, is provided an image which is unseen by the human. Following a brief description of the image, the human questions ALICE about this secret image to identify it from a fixed pool of images. We measure performance of the human-ALICE team by the number of guesses it takes the human to correctly identify the secret image after a fixed number of dialog rounds with ALICE. We compare performance of the human-ALICE teams for two versions of ALICE. Our human studies suggest a counterintuitive trend - that while AI literature shows that one version outperforms the other when paired with an AI questioner bot, we find that this improvement in AI-AI performance does not translate to improved human-AI performance. This suggests a mismatch between benchmarking of AI in isolation and in the context of human-AI teams.
Turing Test. Finally, our game is in line with ideas in @cite_19 , re-imagining the traditional Turing Test for state-of-the-art AI systems, taking the pragmatic view that an effective AI teammate need not appear human-like, act or be mistaken for one, provided its behavior does not feel jarring or baffle teammates, leaving them wondering not about what it is thinking but whether it is.
@cite_19
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In 1950, when Turing proposed to replace the question "Can machines think?" with the question "Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?" computer science was not yet a field of study, Shannon’s theory of information had just begun to change the way people thought about communication, and psychology was only starting to look beyond behaviorism. It is stunning that so many predictions in Turing’s 1950 Mind paper were right. In the decades since that paper appeared, with its inspiring challenges, research in computer science, neuroscience, and the behavioral sciences has radically changed thinking about mental processes and communication, and the ways in which people use computers has evolved even more dramatically. Turing, were he writing now, might still replace "Can machines think?" with an operational challenge, but it is likely he would propose a very different test. This paper considers what that might be in light of Turing’s paper and advances in the decades since it was written.