ahaaa so that’s what this was named after

The tomfoolery surrounding the bots is fun, but anyone in the Lambda guy state of mind about this topic is worth ignoring if you ask me.

Isn’t the real revolution in the fact that the mirror is polished enough that it can replace another humans in a set of tasks, where the excitement is in discovering the size of that set?

The Eliza game (which is actually a visual novel about Seattle tech scene burnout) contains the namegiving Eliza AI which automates therapy sessions by using the standard therapy play book and giving ChatGPT responses in that framework. The subtext is that it was a supposedly revolutionary thing that failed to actually change all that much besides creating a privacy hellhole and putting therapeutics out of work.

For me, the interesting part about this whole boom is that yes, it’s a next word predicting bot all the way down, but if that hammer is strong enough than it will find significant nails to flatten.

There are some people arguing “aren’t we also next word predicting creatures in some ways” and I get that, the mirror is oh so polished. I think it’s a maybe the only interesting discussion in that existential corner of the AI debates, but that doesn’t mean I’m convinced of that.