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.

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. #ai #cybersecurity

@hacks4pancakes part of being an internet citizen means you must be sceptical. Or at least it would be healthy for people to be sceptical.
Understanding the caveats of situations, websites, and services is essential for wellbeing and safety.
How many situations could be improved from people engaging their critical thinking.
I do my best every day working with others. And at home with my children.

@simonoid @hacks4pancakes it does seem like the way young people are inducted into "internet citizenship" is so totally different from how eg i got into it as a teenager / young adult in the late 90s. i learned to spot and deal with trolls and hoaxes, "photoshopped" images when those became a thing, obviously biased news sources as 9/11 & the iraq invasion happened, and so on. in retrospect i was tremendously lucky to be able to build that media literacy in layers as new developments emerged.