Yeah I definitely think LLMs contributed to its demise. To be honest, nobody in academic AI circles took it very seriously, because it kind of devolved into a contest over who could create the most convincing illusion of intelligence.
Participants spent more time polishing up the natural language parsing aspects in conjunction with pre‑programming elaborate backstories for their chatbot's bios among other psychological tricks. In the end, the whole competition was more impressive as a social engineering exercise, since the real goal kinda became: how can I trick people into thinking my chatbot is a human?
But reading through some of the previous competition chatbot transcripts still makes for fascinating reading.
Hi. I got a notification for this message in my email, so thought I'd reply. My name is Steve Worswick and I won the Loebner Prize a record 5 times with my entry Mitsuku between 2013 to the last contest in 2019. The Loebner Prize didn't take part in 2020 due to Covid restrictions and never started back up again. This along with the death of Hugh Loebner and the resulting end of his sponsorship is why the contest ended. LLMs started to become more popular in 2020 but this was pure coincidence.
Participants spent more time polishing up the natural language parsing aspects in conjunction with pre‑programming elaborate backstories for their chatbot's bios among other psychological tricks. In the end, the whole competition was more impressive as a social engineering exercise, since the real goal kinda became: how can I trick people into thinking my chatbot is a human?
But reading through some of the previous competition chatbot transcripts still makes for fascinating reading.