Lesley Carhart Aug 24, 2025

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.

Show threadLesley Carhart Aug 24, 2025
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.
Show threadLesley Carhart Aug 24, 2025
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.
Show threadLesley Carhart Aug 24, 2025
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.
Show threadLesley Carhart Aug 24, 2025
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.
Show threadLesley Carhart Aug 24, 2025
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.
Show threadLesley Carhart Aug 24, 2025
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. #ai #cybersecurity
Show threadMark ReidAug 24, 2025

@hacks4pancakes I’m sure you’re aware of it already but, to emphasise your point, this type of problem with chat bots and the illusion goes back to probably the first ever chat bot:

“Some subjects have been very hard to convince that Eliza (with its present script) is not human”. His secretary asked for time with Eliza and that Weizenbaum leave the room. “I believe this anecdote testifies to the success with which the program maintains the illusion of understanding” (from Weizenbaum’s paper)

Show threadLesley Carhart Aug 24, 2025
@mdreid it was the same era, yeah. I worked with Eliza stuff too
Show threadMark Reid
@hacks4pancakes If we’re talking about the same AIML, I think that was a bit later than Eliza. The quote was from a 1967(?) paper. But Eliza was still around and relevant in the 80s/90s.
Aug 24, 2025 at 8:05amToot!
Show threadMark ReidAug 24, 2025
@hacks4pancakes I guess it also depends how we define “era” :)
Show threadDavid Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)Aug 24, 2025

@mdreid @hacks4pancakes

The hype happened again in the ‘90s. I remember the BBC Tomorrow’s World doing an online Turing Test with three bots and three humans. It was far from rigorous science (many people could talk to the bots at the same time, the humans could conduct one conversation at a time, so the probability of talking to a human was very low). The main thing I remember was that Craig Charles being one of the humans and fewer people though he was a human than thought the bots were. To my knowledge, he is the only human to have failed a structured Turing Test.

Show threadOskar im KellerAug 25, 2025

@david_chisnall

Is that the same Craig Charles who still moderates on BBC6Music? I mean he can talk a lot of harmless nonsense on air.

Show threadDavid Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)Aug 25, 2025
@OskarImKeller could be. Lister from Red Dwarf.
Show threadOskar im KellerAug 25, 2025

@david_chisnall

Same person
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Charles

Craig Charles - Wikipedia