This feels like a very @SwiftOnSecurity story but I’m going to tell it.

Chat bots (not just LLM driven) are surprisingly old. In the mid 90s, a mark up language for string-driven bots called AIML was released. A small community of early hackers and devs got really into it. I was part as a teen.

To use AIML, you had to know a lot about computers. You had to really understand how it worked to build your own chat bot. It could learn over time by building a database of string based responses. You could hard code responses to full and partial strings like words and phrases. It was hard work.

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.