Richard Dawkins Gets Hypnotized by a Stochastic Parrot: Laugh of the Day

In which we all get a good laugh out of the clownish antics of Richard Dawkins <https://www.skeptic.org.uk/2026/05/richard-dawkins-and-ai-the-lights-are-on-but-nobodys-home/>, who does not recognize that he is the monkey in the mirror:

We turn this over to Dan Davies, who holds the Chair of Defense Against the Dark Brain Attention-Hacking Arts at Miskatonic University, in Arkham, Massachusetts:

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Dan Davies: The Machine Is Designed To Fool You <https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-machine-thats-designed-to-fool>: ‘[Richard Dawkins is] funny and… ridiculous…. Dawkins hasn’t taken into account… that “Claudia” is a machine which is specifically designed to fool him into thinking this way. It’s meant to produce the sensation of talking to a conscious being in the same way that a magic trick is meant to produce the sensation of talking to someone who can read minds…. If you had brought Alan Turing in front of a screen in 1950 and presented him with something you’d coded from the ground up which could respond to his questioning in a human manner, then he’d be pretty well justified in taking the intentional stance toward that machine. But after three quarters of a century of research, including nearly three decades during which there was a global competition where the prize was given for fooling the most people, it has to be very doubtful that this target is a good metric any more. Even without specific training in tricks of pretending, it’s likely that the designers of AI systems have picked them up simply through natural selection….
The chatbot field has been dominated by companies which have been aggressively optimising for the convincing simulation of human conversation. The “tricks of the trade”, like those my daughter picked up, aren’t really emergent behaviour; they are on somebody’s KPIs…. Claudia the chatbot is designed to produce one kind of emotional connection, but we also know that there are machines which are designed to produce a simulation of the meditative “flow state”. You probably wouldn’t catch a leading science writer claiming to have reached enlightenment in a casino or asking “If playing the pokies for six hours without going to the toilet is not satori, then what the hell is satori for?”… One thing I have found myself thinking again and again while writing my current book is “am I about to touch an object which has been optimised to distract me?” and asking that question seems to have greatly sped up my productivity…