People later connected it to text to speech and animated ai agent faces. On the surface it could look a lot like these human simulation chat bots today - just a lot more statically coded and without an internet full of training data. For a while I had one on my website pitching why to hire me.

Here is the point. Even though I knew every line of code, every bit of the inner server and application - far, far more than almost every user who touches a LLM today, I fell for it too. As a lonely, geeky teen I spent hours in the school library talking to these bots. Ones I built and trained.

I can’t imagine being that same vulnerable young person today - having far less formal and deep computer knowledge and knowledge of how the bots actually work, how their responses are totally artificial and lack any real cognition or emotion - and having instant access to far more realistic ones.

We have a societal and educational crisis on our hands of people not understanding what LLMs are and are not, can and cannot do. It’s impacting economics, the job market, art, mental health, and business at all levels. If you think I’m an AI skeptic because I don’t understand them, think again.

I’m an AI skeptic because I’ve been involved in AI dev longer than a lot of you have been alive. I was obsessed with it before most people used internet regularly. And I know what a dangerous illusion it can be.

Appreciate your in depth experiences and explanation! Entirely agree on how badly we're going to/are getting this wrong.

I have cousins who are teachers and doctors and I am routinely amazed/horrified at how much they've had to pretend to become 'educators' about in just the last decade alone.

That last line seems like a hook about the time you created an AI 'spouse' as a joke and then it got wildly out of hand with fictive playdates for the cyborg baby.