| Somehow ended up after reading OP earlier this morning on a trail that lead to "Alexander of Abonoteichus – The False Prophet of 2nd Century Greece" [1]. A certain Lucian of Samorsata [2] wrote up the only known bio on the man [3] and it makes for interesting reading. Now this guy was charging 1 drachma and 6 obols (apparently ~$100-150) per oracle. So that was his 'token rate'. And his clients the "fat-heads" (Lucian's phrasing not mine /g) were so taken by the scam that this guy earned up to 80,000 drachma per year! That's over 10 million bucks. For spewing b.s. As to why all this is remotely related to OP's article, his mention of lawyers getting into trouble because of using LLM output instead of their brains ... "By way of impressing the people still more, he announced that he would induce the God to speak, and give his responses without an intermediary ... These oracles were called autophones, and were not vouchsafed casually to any one, but reserved for officials, the rich, and the lavish. "It was an autophone which was given to Severiann [4] regarding the invasion of Armenia. He encouraged him with these lines: 'Armenia, Parthia, cowed by thy fierce spear,
To Rome, and Tiber's shining waves, thou com'st,
Thy brow with leaves and radiant gold encircled!' "Then when the foolish Gaul took his advice and invaded, to the total destruction of himself and his army by Othryades, the adviser expunged that oracle from his archives [!!!] and substituted the following: "'Vex not th' Armenian land; it shall not thrive;
One in soft raiment clad shall from his bow Launch death,
and cut thee off from life and light.'" [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_of_Abonoteichus [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucian_of_Samosata [3]: https://topostext.org/work/337 [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Sedatius_Severianus |