Many of you asked that I react to Richard Dawkins announcing that he fell for a chatbot.
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@rebeccawatson I was looking at Turing's paper about the "imitation game" a few days ago, and found out Turing was making a much more limited claim than was ascribed to him, and it wasn't about consciousness. I still was getting it a bit wrong, in that I thought it was still about whether machines could be said to think.
It's interesting that the original form of the "imitation game" he uses as a model is about determining a person's gender.
@foolishowl @rebeccawatson so much "legend" built around turing, but reading his papers really shows what a careful and subtle thinker he was. very inspiring and humbling.
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@rebeccawatson I was looking at Turing's paper about the "imitation game" a few days ago, and found out Turing was making a much more limited claim than was ascribed to him, and it wasn't about consciousness. I still was getting it a bit wrong, in that I thought it was still about whether machines could be said to think.
It's interesting that the original form of the "imitation game" he uses as a model is about determining a person's gender.
@foolishowl @rebeccawatson Random factoid: Turing's Ph.D supervisor was none other than Alonzo Church, who developed the lambda-calculus upon which the LISP programming language, popular with MIT CSAIL in the 70s and 80s, was based. The pi-calculus developed by Robin Milner is peripherally related but has deixis in the time domain applying to networked communication.
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@foolishowl @rebeccawatson so much "legend" built around turing, but reading his papers really shows what a careful and subtle thinker he was. very inspiring and humbling.
@foolishowl @rebeccawatson just for wider reference, because it's getting increasingly annoying to find: https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/turing.pdf
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@foolishowl @rebeccawatson Random factoid: Turing's Ph.D supervisor was none other than Alonzo Church, who developed the lambda-calculus upon which the LISP programming language, popular with MIT CSAIL in the 70s and 80s, was based. The pi-calculus developed by Robin Milner is peripherally related but has deixis in the time domain applying to networked communication.
@foolishowl @rebeccawatson Also someone is raining on Yann Lecun's world model parade before he's even engaged the work fully. http://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10624 As someone who had reason to read the Bhagavad Gita in the past, I find Dawkins' functionalism utterly uninformed.
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Many of you asked that I react to Richard Dawkins announcing that he fell for a chatbot. Instead of just pointing and laughing (my initial reaction obv) I dug into the “why” of it all: his obfuscations, insecurities, and utter sadness https://skepchick.org/2026/05/richard-dawkins-claude-delusion/
@rebeccawatson LLMs in general are very generous with compliments. You can even instruct them to take on a role (like a woman) for context.
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Many of you asked that I react to Richard Dawkins announcing that he fell for a chatbot. Instead of just pointing and laughing (my initial reaction obv) I dug into the “why” of it all: his obfuscations, insecurities, and utter sadness https://skepchick.org/2026/05/richard-dawkins-claude-delusion/
@rebeccawatson delicious
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Many of you asked that I react to Richard Dawkins announcing that he fell for a chatbot. Instead of just pointing and laughing (my initial reaction obv) I dug into the “why” of it all: his obfuscations, insecurities, and utter sadness https://skepchick.org/2026/05/richard-dawkins-claude-delusion/
@rebeccawatson Dawkins believes the bot because the bot says it's true? Like religious people believe in their texts because they say it's true?
Except it's not some old text that people can be excused to think was written with good intent.
We KNOW the machine was created to be a more extreme spell checker that is also sycophantic. Like, the people that created it are alive right now and not even they (usually!) try to claim the bot is conscious.
This is dumber than what he usually criticises. -
Many of you asked that I react to Richard Dawkins announcing that he fell for a chatbot. Instead of just pointing and laughing (my initial reaction obv) I dug into the “why” of it all: his obfuscations, insecurities, and utter sadness https://skepchick.org/2026/05/richard-dawkins-claude-delusion/
@rebeccawatson
It's established long ago that being an expert in one field (in this case Biology) doesn't make you generally expert.
Philosophy may use logic, but not particularly facts. Theology is separate from religion, faith and ritual. Dawkin showed in the God Delusion that he knew little about religions other than Christianity and was clueless on theology & a poor philosopher.
His opinion on other than the narrow scientific field he's expert at is like interviewing a cleaner about Nukes. -
Many of you asked that I react to Richard Dawkins announcing that he fell for a chatbot. Instead of just pointing and laughing (my initial reaction obv) I dug into the “why” of it all: his obfuscations, insecurities, and utter sadness https://skepchick.org/2026/05/richard-dawkins-claude-delusion/
@rebeccawatson
x and youtube
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R relay@relay.infosec.exchange shared this topic
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@rebeccawatson What caused you to cancel Ivory? Was it the user interface, missing features? Anything specific?
@aburtch @rebeccawatson the author of ivory has gone full LLM-bro
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@aburtch @rebeccawatson the author of ivory has gone full LLM-bro
@rejj @rebeccawatson well that sucks…
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Many of you asked that I react to Richard Dawkins announcing that he fell for a chatbot. Instead of just pointing and laughing (my initial reaction obv) I dug into the “why” of it all: his obfuscations, insecurities, and utter sadness https://skepchick.org/2026/05/richard-dawkins-claude-delusion/
@rebeccawatson Great piece, well nuanced. Dawkins is a narcissist, and believes he is always right... Maybe thinks he is a god?
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Many of you asked that I react to Richard Dawkins announcing that he fell for a chatbot. Instead of just pointing and laughing (my initial reaction obv) I dug into the “why” of it all: his obfuscations, insecurities, and utter sadness https://skepchick.org/2026/05/richard-dawkins-claude-delusion/
@rebeccawatson So sad. Dawkins was one of the most brilliant evolutionary biologist. I don’t think his downfall is funny at all.
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Many of you asked that I react to Richard Dawkins announcing that he fell for a chatbot. Instead of just pointing and laughing (my initial reaction obv) I dug into the “why” of it all: his obfuscations, insecurities, and utter sadness https://skepchick.org/2026/05/richard-dawkins-claude-delusion/
@rebeccawatson That title is
🤌 
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Many of you asked that I react to Richard Dawkins announcing that he fell for a chatbot. Instead of just pointing and laughing (my initial reaction obv) I dug into the “why” of it all: his obfuscations, insecurities, and utter sadness https://skepchick.org/2026/05/richard-dawkins-claude-delusion/
@rebeccawatson Stephan Krosecz: "It betrays a fundamental inability to internalize that the machine cannot understand you."
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Many of you asked that I react to Richard Dawkins announcing that he fell for a chatbot. Instead of just pointing and laughing (my initial reaction obv) I dug into the “why” of it all: his obfuscations, insecurities, and utter sadness https://skepchick.org/2026/05/richard-dawkins-claude-delusion/
@rebeccawatson fucking fantastic article. Thank you.
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Many of you asked that I react to Richard Dawkins announcing that he fell for a chatbot. Instead of just pointing and laughing (my initial reaction obv) I dug into the “why” of it all: his obfuscations, insecurities, and utter sadness https://skepchick.org/2026/05/richard-dawkins-claude-delusion/
@rebeccawatson
Richard Dawkins is why I still believe in God. -
@rebeccawatson So sad. Dawkins was one of the most brilliant evolutionary biologist. I don’t think his downfall is funny at all.
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@foolishowl @rebeccawatson just for wider reference, because it's getting increasingly annoying to find: https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/turing.pdf
@mnl @foolishowl @rebeccawatson thanks for the link! I was aware that the Turing test isn't about what most people think, but I didn't remember any more details, so being able to read up on it is great!
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Apologies for the double post…I cancelled my subscription to Ivory, the Mastodon app refused to show my post despite refreshing for several minutes, and the new app Ice Cubes won’t seem to let me delete the repost. I’m still better at technology than Richard Dawkins.
@rebeccawatson What's wrong with Tusky? Works great for me
