"Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn - you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think "oh, the lawnmower hates me" – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle."
I get a chuckle out of that quote like the rest of us, but what I don't like about the metaphor is that the lawnmower has no agency and thus bears no responsibility for the damage it causes, whereas Larry Ellison does.
It may not be worthy to question Oracle and Larry motives - it's money, at the cost of anything else (although his pro Israel stance may unveil some other ideology too).
But it's worthy to say they should be held accountable for the scrap they do. Unless we grow so cynical to think the system is deeply rotten and cannot be changed - which is a valid feeling to have given all ongoing events, but there's also some glimmers of hope here and there that are gaining traction.
We rarely have preferences that are independent of the concrete use case. Your argument boils down to saying that existing precedence hierarchies are badly designed (or else they would always match everyone’s intuitions), but that’s not the case. (Operator precedence is only one illustrative example here.)
You should look up the history of the Loebner Prize [1]. There’s a shocking amount of technological development in some chatbots that went toward simulating mistakes and typing patterns to make them seem more human-like.
In some of the later Loebner competitions, when text was transmitted to the human character by character, the bot would even simulate typos followed by backspacing on screen to make it look more realistic.
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.
reply