Many of you asked that I react to Richard Dawkins announcing that he fell for a chatbot.
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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
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@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!
@Larymir @foolishowl @rebeccawatson in using the occasion too!
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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 I would be absolutely CHUFFED if we never heard about Richard Dawkins ever again.
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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 People fell for Eliza 60 years ago. Eliza did already prove that reflection is sufficient to fool many people. The Turing test is dead since then.
What these systems are still useful is to check who can be fooled. They are heavily biased to be servants, and that is ok, because that's how they can be somewhat useful. If their answers would be as rude as the Reddit training material, people wouldn't use them.
Actually, those who understand and know the limits of these systems are the ones who get the most useful outputs, but are least inclined to use them. The ones who use them most don't get much useful results.
If you fall for Claude, I assume that you'll also fall for Epstein. Or, likely more people would fall into Epstein's trap, because he was smarter than Claude is. Manipulation was his business. Influencing influencers.
Epstein's traps might have worked less for people who don't become influencial. As you wrote: big ego is the key to fall into such a trap.
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R relay@relay.mycrowd.ca shared this topic
