AI is a lineal descendant of ELIZA, a computer program whose antecedents were developed in the days when computers had glowing tubes and communicated with the outside world via a modified Telex printer and keyboard, before it became a fax. I guess most of you, even those who think of themselves as in the prime of their middle age, weren't even born then.
When there were no more than about 500 computers in the entire world, I had a computer, an obsolete model given to me by a cousin who was chairman of the largest insurance company in the country, in return for bringing a bunch of engineers from the electrical engineering department (yeah, that long ago, before electronics was even a common word) to take the thing out neatly so that the new, more sophisticated version could be inserted in the temperature- and humidity-controlled space computers then demanded.
I used my computer in the basement of the Carnegie Library to design hemiheads for the Chrysler engines in my racing cars. This employed vector math tables made up from the computer's computational results to make hand drawn curves from which the twisted math was also used in the randomization required for the artificial psychiatrist. (Later I would use irreversible modular math, modified by the product of two very large primes to put some inarguable distance between the interlocutors and the subject, thus a double layer of irreversibility, at least as long as the two very large primes were also relatively prime.) I was dragged into the early pre-ELIZA speculation because I was qualified and innovative and curious enough to help those propagating such a monstrous underlying lie -- that a computer could be sentient -- which I didn't believe then, and don't believe now. I wrote the variations of "how do you feel about that" and prepared the outline for my programmers (like modern "coders" but in white coats because they were engineers and told by their teachers they should look like engineers) to have the variations served up either randomly or to reinforce the prejudices of the respondent based on linguistic analysis of whatever he said from the moment he stepped into our interview room, which a court reporter transcribed onto the keyboard in the next room in real time, so that by the time the formal test started, we knew quite a lot about the respondent, and could dice and mix it it into our own contribution, in those halcyon days literally by taking a pair of scissors to our paper roll of printout, pasting our up in some pattern, and having it typed back in to the computer. Those who later pretended we had our finger on the scales were just ignorant or had skin in the game of making people believe a computer could be sentient: the very point was our finger on the scales, without which the experiment wouldn't have worked, and with AI that is still the basic, 100% true operating principle, on a much larger scale:
AI gives you back only what you put in, reflects your biases and prejudices as illuminated in where you tell it to search for raw material, and in a thousand other ways. To expect otherwise is naive. The internet makes AI the lowest common denominator, monstrously magnified. It's like all the information in the world is filtered through Wikipedia's even dumber, more willfully ignorant, illegitimate cousin. Wikipedia is silly enough, but you ain't seen nothing yet of the chaos in existential information (crop yields, anyone?) that will arrive when AI starts feeding on its own tail of misinformation (weather forecasting after the decades-deep lies of the global warmies?).
Our early version of a computerized headshrinker was a satirical stab at making a computer sound like a psychiatrist; the proof was said to be that people in one room with no means of seeing that they were actually dealing with a computer in the next room, should think that they were talking to a live, human psychiatrist. ELIZA was crude, in some ways cruder than our early model, at root merely taking whatever the respondent gave it, and asking in as many ways as possible what the respondent felt about that.
Modern AI is the same thing, just bigger and slicker in its presentation, but the underlying lies are as crude as ever.
If you have to use AI, try GROK, which is a lot more honest and varied than the Google/Meta etc censors' version of AI (they say "curated" but they mean "our truth" or even "you proles can't handle the truth!").
AI is easily recognized as the 2026 version of the global warmie lie that "98 percent of scientists agree".
In this perspective, I think Thorn has escaped only lightly traduced by the clownish AI from Google. It could have been so much worse: Thorn bikes could easily have been loaded up with years of criticism of Mercury cars, the dissolute life-style of the messenger or the Gods, etc.
