[labrador]

I was watching "HyperNormalisation" by Adam Curtis for the second time. In his segment on Eliza, an early example of a chat bot, I realized that Curtis makes a mistake in his interpretation of Eliza. For Curtis it's narcissism that makes Eliza attractive. Curtis levels the charge that Westerners are individualistic and self-centered often.

But when an interview with the creator Joseph Weizenbaum is shown starting at 01hr:22min, he never says that. He relates how his secretary took to it, and even though she knew it was a primitive computer program, she wanted some privacy while she used it. Weizenbaum was puzzled by that, but then the secretary (or possibly another woman) says Eliza doesn't judge me and it doesn't try to have sex with me.

What jumped out at me was that Weizenbaum's secretary was using Eliza as a thinking tool to clarify her thoughts. Most high school graduates in America don't learn critical thinking skills as far as I can tell. Eliza is a useful tool because it encourages critical thinking and second order thinking by asking questions and reflecting back answers and asking questions in another way. The secretary didn't want to use Eliza because she was a narcissist, she wanted to talk through some sensitive issues with what she knew was a dumb program so she could try and resolve them.

That's how I feel about ChatGPT so far. It's a great thinking tool. Someone to bounce ideas around with. Of course, I know it's a dumb computer program and it makes mistakes, but it's still a cool new tool to have in the toolbox.

HyperNormalisation by Adam Curtis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS_c2qqA-6Y

Eliza

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

[solomania9]

Great point. I agree it's an amazing thinking tool and has helped me a lot in that regard.

If you haven't already seen this post, it echoes a lot of what you're describing: https://every.to/chain-of-thought/gpt-3-is-the-best-journal-...

[labrador]

Thanks for the link. I've been journaling for over 20 years. I want to feed my writings into a LLM because I know I've come up with some good answers for personal issues before, but they are buried in my writings. It would be great to pull out a summary of my thinking about some recurring issue.

This is especially true because I'm a senior citizen and have noticed a decline in my memory.

[msla]

> Curtis levels the charge that Westerners are individualistic and self-centered often.

Thinking you can classify whole groups of people as if they were insects is a horrible mental handicap.

[labrador]

Curtis' shtick gets old after awhile. To hear him tell it we can no longer make sense of the world because it's complicated and politicians lie to us all the time, so we retreat into a mirrored room of our self, gratifying every desire to escape thinking about our futile life and soon approaching death.

I've watched just about everything he's made and honestly, he starts to sound like a moralizing preacher after awhile. We are selfish, self-centered, infantile, wanting computers to watch over us so we our worst impulses don't destroy us and so on. Things a preacher might say.

But his documentaries prompt me to think in different ways with other ideas, so I appreciate them for that