A read-only interlocutor is a robot troll.
![A vintage 5.5" floppy disk. Its write-protection tab has been covered with the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Its label contains the scrawled word “ChatGPT.” In its center disc is a hypnotic spiral.](https://i0.wp.com/pluralistic.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/864d7-1usubq2yrnbyv_kr5ub3ywa.jpeg?w=840&ssl=1)
In 1977, my father, a computer scientist, brought home a teletype terminal (a keyboard and a printer, no screen) and an acoustic coupler (a box with two suction-cups that matched up with the speaker and mic on the receiver of a standard Bell phone), and he connected it to the DEC PDP minicomputer at the University of Toronto. I was seven years old. I was hooked.
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