Kathy Reid<p>This is a beautifully-written, haunting, ambiguous and resonant exploration of one of the founding fathers of <a href="https://aus.social/tags/AI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>AI</span></a> - Joseph Weizenbaum - and the demons that drove his work in early <a href="https://aus.social/tags/ConversationalAI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>ConversationalAI</span></a> with <a href="https://aus.social/tags/Eliza" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Eliza</span></a>. As Weizenbaum rightly asserts, our context, our history, our experience, shapes our relationship with, and toward, technology.</p><p>"Yet, as Eliza illustrated, it was surprisingly easy to trick people into feeling that a computer did know them – and into seeing that computer as human. Even in his original 1966 article, Weizenbaum had worried about the consequences of this phenomenon, warning that it might lead people to regard computers as possessing powers of “judgment” that are “deserving of credibility”. “A certain danger lurks there,” he wrote."</p><p>A certain danger lurks there. As applicable now in an age of <a href="https://aus.social/tags/GenerativeAI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>GenerativeAI</span></a> as it was in the 1960s. </p><p>Thank you <span class="h-card"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@bentarnoff" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">@<span>bentarnoff</span></a></span> for such an incisive piece. h/t to @criticalai for bringing it to my attention.</p><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/25/joseph-weizenbaum-inventor-eliza-chatbot-turned-against-artificial-intelligence-ai" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">theguardian.com/technology/202</span><span class="invisible">3/jul/25/joseph-weizenbaum-inventor-eliza-chatbot-turned-against-artificial-intelligence-ai</span></a></p>