Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 40, No. 123.
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        Date: 2026-08-17 06:50:27+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: chatbot narcissism

Connection between chatbots used in the manner of ELIZA and Ovid's story
of Narcissus in the Metamorphoses has been made numerous times. A recent
alert from the Human Centered Artificial Intelligence people at Stanford
gives us Zhang et al, "Interaction with AI Companions and Psychological
Well-being" (4/5/2026, now in arXiv:2506.12605v5) to add to the list of
relevant work along these lines, although it does not mention the
Ovidian original. Likewise the very fine study by Ciston, Berry et al.,
Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI (MIT
Press, 2026); see e.g. p. 134 there:

> The legacy of ELIZA's personas can be said to live on in today's
> ubiquitous Al assistants. But whereas Weizenbaum's hand-edited
> transcripts made his editorial role visible to those who searched the
> archives, the editorial choices made in training contemporary large
> language models remain largely invisible to users. The history of
> ELIZA reminds us that any seemingly autonomous computational persona
> is ultimately a product of human design, user interpretation, and
> careful curation. It becomes a collaborative performance that creates
> an illusion of an independent agent while obscuring the human hands
> that shape and maintain it.

Someone (I forgot the source) has observed that turning to chatbots
based on LLMs fixates our consciousness on the past, i.e. our historical
selves beyond individual memory, as if the past were an oracle, not the
future, not the Other, and so stunts our imaginations.

Comments and further references to this line of thought would be most
welcome.

Best,
WM
--
Willard McCarty,
Professor em., King's College London;
www.mccarty.org.uk


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