A Beginner's Guide to AI

The Eliza Effect: Why Humans Open Up to Machines - and Confess Everything!

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Ever felt like your chatbot truly understands your feelings? Welcome to the fascinating world of the Eliza Effect!

In today’s lively episode of A Beginner’s Guide to AI, Professor GePhardT explores why we humans so easily attribute genuine empathy and intelligence to simple computer programs. Discover the quirky 1960s origins of ELIZA—the chatbot that started it all—and why, even decades later, we still fall for AI’s emotional tricks.

Using engaging examples, from friendly bakery touchscreens to advanced chatbots like Google’s LaMDA, we’ll uncover both the amusing and potentially serious consequences of mistaking AI’s clever scripts for real human understanding.

Tune in for insightful stories, practical exercises, and a healthy dose of humour to help you critically evaluate AI interactions and truly grasp their limits. Because behind every empathetic AI lies not a beating heart—but a well-designed algorithm.

Get my thoughts: don’t forget to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠subscribe to our Newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠!

Want to get in contact? Write me an email: [email protected]

This podcast was generated with the help of ChatGPT, Mistral, and Claude 3. We do fact-check with human eyes, but there still might be hallucinations in the output. And, by the way, it’s read by an AI voice.

Music credit: “Modern Situations” by Unicorn Heads

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