https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect “More generally, the ELIZA effect describes any situation where, based solely on a system’s output, users perceive computer systems as having ‘intrinsic qualities and abilities which the software controlling the (output) cannot possibly achieve,’ or assume that outputs reflect a greater causality than they actually do.” ELIZA was one of the first chatbots, built at MIT in the 1960s. I remember playing with a version of it as a kid; it was fascinating, yet obviously limited. A few stock responses and you quickly hit the wall. Now scale that program up by billions of operations per second and you get one modern GPU; cluster a few thousand of those and you have ChatGPT. The conversation suddenly feels alive, and the ELIZA Effect multiplies. All the t...