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A Word About ChatGPT / Grok / Etc
Prostate Cancer | Last Active: Dec 15, 2025 | Replies (19)Comment receiving replies
I had just started my career in software engineering when the first "AI" software was written in 1966: "Eliza", 420 lines of code & a modest English database. Its author has turned against AI: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/25/joseph-weizenbaum-inventor-eliza-chatbot-turned-against-artificial-intelligence-ai
In tests, it beat modern AI products until very recently.
Consider the number of mistakes that modern AI makes on subjects I know something about, not to mention the obvious misinterpretations of many scanned articles. AI has a VERY long way to go to deserve the trust that it tries to demand.
My conclusion: The emperor's weavers are trying to sell us a bill of goods, as is apparent from the money-grubbing commercials that they have been running on TV: "We can't let the Chinese beat us! We must be first!"
Modern AI is somewhat useful, but the hype about it is fundamentally dishonest, & is being used to scam unknowledgeable investors. Even worse, it is deceiving the public into trusting it. Finally, it is annoying with its ham-fisted integration into other software products which you cannot turn off. Google's Gemini & Microsoft's Copilot are excellent examples of intrusive features that are difficult or impossible to disable.
Most of Google's search engine responses are AI, & many of them link to YouTube videos. As if egotistical YouTube videos are the authority on which to make decisions! I prefer written articles for authoritative information.
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The article about Weizenbaum you linked to is really outstanding, thanks! I would just point out, as the article tells us, that Weizenbaum turned against AI the moment that Eliza was completed and impressed many people, not so much with how good it was, though it was better accepted than he expected, but because it was done so simply, on such primitive machines! Much larger AI project had already disappointed people. But this article describes how Weizenbaum was perhaps predispositioned to negative opinions. Perhaps ironically that's the very thing that gave him the insights for the project in the first place! Partially on his negative evaluation the real achievements of the Eliza project were deprecated for the next fifty years - and still!
Current LLMs are miles bigger and better than Eliza, but the same still holds, they impress people not for perfection but because they work at all - which is what the old cliché says about talking horses: if a talking horse should make a grammatical mistake, hey, it's still a talking horse!
The greatest feature of today's LLMs is probably their convenience (and great price - free!). If they are even 51% useful, that's a win. But as the comments here say, it makes many mistakes. For a freebie, well, there you go.