@sj_zero @waltercool @grey

> It's like talking to a less advanced version of eliza

Well, I'm gonna quote the same thing I quoted in the
https://blog.freespeechextremist.com/blog/on-human-bots.html post:

> [Richard] Wallace's theory of A.I. is no theory at all. It's not that he doesn't believe in artificial intelligence, per se; rather, he doesn't much believe in intelligence, period. In a way that oddly befits a contest sponsored by a bunch of Skinnerians, Wallace's ALICE program is based strictly on a stimulus-response model. You type something in, if the program recognizes what you typed, it picks a clever, appropriate, "canned" answer.
> There is no representation of knowledge, no common-sense reasoning, no inference engine to mimic human thought. Just a very long list of canned answers, from which it picks the best option. Basically, it's Eliza on steroids.
> Conversations with ALICE are "stateless"; that is, the program doesn't remember what you say from one conversational exchange to the next. Basically it's not listening to a word you say, it's not learning a thing about you, and it has no idea what any of its own utterances mean. It's merely a machine designed to formulate answers that will keep you talking. And this strategy works, Wallace says, because that's what people are: mindless robots who don't listen to each other but merely regurgitate canned answers.

I think talking to them isn't just missing out on some boredom; I think it actually hurts your ability to think. You ever have a discussion with someone and it was clear they were not listening and were picking their responses out of a list of canned rebuttals? I mean, learned helplessness results from a feature of the brain: information that is not relevant is discarded, and information that is not actionable is not relevant. So you talk to those people long enough and all the thoughts that might occur to you during a normal conversation get quieter, the information that is relevant during a stupid internet argument gets louder: I think "stupid internet argument" is a symptom of a (contagious) cognitive disease.