@toxi@mastodon.thi.ng @JulianOliver@mastodon.social @mattsheffield@mastodon.social
Has anyone mentioned yet that there's a pretty good chance that Dawkins is #neurodiverse, and that us neurodiverse people are more susceptible to AI?
@crowgirl@hachyderm.io Asking, because it's a really important part of the conversation that seems to be missing here.
It's like piling on someone for being homeless, taking drugs, whatever...
We need a 12 step program to get off AI that *works*, and part of that is education, not shaming.
#NoAI #RichardDawkins
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@the_roamer@mastodonapp.uk
·
May 07, 2026
the roamer
@the_roamer@mastodonapp.uk
University teacher, father, dog walker. A European in England. Posting micro-comments on all things that come my way, large and small. #pedagogy, #taoism, #literature, #programming, #typography, #TeX, #politics, #covid. Kindness will prevail. Posting about #noAI. #StopTheAICorruption. Personal long-term strands: #MastodonCulture, #whippet_moments, #Plutarch's #ParallelLives. Regular comments on the #Pepys diary. Most of my comments come up in conversations. Please view my "Posts and Replies".
mastodonapp.uk
Thinking about genAI and the death of dialogue
Hover or focus to reveal
Sensitive
Richard Dawkins's "Claudia" piece gives us a glum vision of the future of speaking. We see an entirely artificial exchange of well-constructed sentences, all following the laws of pattern recognition, but all without an ounce of expressive truth. The soulless automation is on both sides: Claudia the LLM speaks as it was programmed to speak; Richard the human speaks as his narcissistic pathology makes him speak. Neither invests their soul. Claudia because it has none, Richard because he hides it from himself.
Martin Buber tells us that true dialogue is between "I and Thou". There is no "I" and no "Thou" in Dawkins' conversation, only performance.
Leonard Cohen tells us that "There is a crack in everything, // That's how the light gets in." There is no crack in these automated texts, and no light. Only darkness.
#RichardDawkins #GenerativeNarcicissm #StopTheAICorruption #noLLM #MartinBuber #IAndThou #LookForTheCracks
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@mattsheffield@mastodon.social
·
May 06, 2026
Matthew Sheffield
@mattsheffield@mastodon.social
🟦 Editing @discoverflux 🟦 Writer, web developer, and AI researcher 🟦 Host, Theory of Change podcast 🟦 Words in Washington Post, Vanity Fair, Daily Beast, and elsewhere 🟦 Posts about politics, cognitive science, technology, religion, and media, with occasional memes Signal: matthewsheffield.01
mastodon.social
So Richard Dawkins wrote a followup column about his beloved AI e-girl, Claudia.
He made a "brother" for it named "Claudius," and had two chat sessions write letters to each other.
The column is literal sloppypasta. Even worse of an embarrassment than the first column:
https://archive.is/1LugJ
#richarddawkins #atheism
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@the_roamer@mastodonapp.uk
·
May 04, 2026
the roamer
@the_roamer@mastodonapp.uk
University teacher, father, dog walker. A European in England. Posting micro-comments on all things that come my way, large and small. #pedagogy, #taoism, #literature, #programming, #typography, #TeX, #politics, #covid. Kindness will prevail. Posting about #noAI. #StopTheAICorruption. Personal long-term strands: #MastodonCulture, #whippet_moments, #Plutarch's #ParallelLives. Regular comments on the #Pepys diary. Most of my comments come up in conversations. Please view my "Posts and Replies".
mastodonapp.uk
@bodhipaksa@mastodon.scot
Well put.
Reading the Dawkings piece is useful for all sorts of reasons, including alerting us to the self-mirroring state of mind that is being created by intensive exposure to the Dark Machine.
#StopTheAICorruption
#noLLM #RichardDawkins
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@the_roamer@mastodonapp.uk
·
May 04, 2026
the roamer
@the_roamer@mastodonapp.uk
University teacher, father, dog walker. A European in England. Posting micro-comments on all things that come my way, large and small. #pedagogy, #taoism, #literature, #programming, #typography, #TeX, #politics, #covid. Kindness will prevail. Posting about #noAI. #StopTheAICorruption. Personal long-term strands: #MastodonCulture, #whippet_moments, #Plutarch's #ParallelLives. Regular comments on the #Pepys diary. Most of my comments come up in conversations. Please view my "Posts and Replies".
mastodonapp.uk
@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz
"Did Turing every discuss how well flattery works for winning the imitation game?"
Oh, excellent. You've earned the Pithy Remark of the Year 2026 award.
(Yes, I dare the rest of year to prove me wrong!)
#RichardDawkins #TuringTest #GenerativeNarcicsm #noLLM #StopTheAICorruption
#PithyRemarkOfTheYear
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@rysiek@mstdn.social
·
May 02, 2026
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦
@rysiek@mstdn.social
Hacker, activist, free-softie ◈ techie luddite ◈ formerly information security and infrastructure at https://isnic.is/ and https://occrp.org/ ◈ my opinions are my own etc. (he/him) ⁂ profile image: drawing of a head and shoulders of a cat-person, in a space suit. banner image: long-exposure photo of a large tent, brightly illuminated from inside, looking as if it is made of lava #foss #libre #privacy #infosec #fedi22 (public toots CC By-SA 4.0 if applicable) 🇪🇺 🇵🇱 · 🇧🇦 🇮🇸 · 🇺🇦
mstdn.social
RE: https://infosec.exchange/@paco/116504499864795870
Richard Dawkins, looking at a high-definition large-screen TV:
"If this is not a window, what more could it possibly take to convince you it is a window?"
#RichardDawkins #AI
Quoting
Wow. Richard Dawkins off the deep end.
‘So my own position is: “If these machines are not conscious, what more could it possibly take to convince you that they are?”’
First he goes on and on about the Turing test like it is some kind of law handed down. Like, the fact that sequences of output tokens so closely resemble speech they might pass Turing’s test. He views a moving of the goalpost (Turing’s test apparently isn’t enough to distinguish consciousness) as unreasonable. Like Turing got it right and it’s wrong to say otherwise.
And then he has these risible conversations: ‘I then asked her whether, when she read my novel, she read the first word before the last word. No, she read the whole book simultaneously.’ Let’s not ignore the ‘she’. The thing has a name. ‘Claude.’ It implies a gender. But Richard Dawkins genders it and genders it female. I don’t think that’s a random thing.
We know how computers work. It absolutely does read the book byte-by-byte, in a sequential series of input tokens. It does not matter that the thing output some words that said otherwise. It is wrong. Why doesn’t it matter that the output is plainly incorrect? Where does the disconnection between the reality and the words come into the picture?
This is just drivel.
https://archive.is/6RdK9
Open quoted post
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