ELIZA effect strikes again: why the industry overlooks that AI has no self
gerardsans · x · 2026-10-06
gerardsans continues his debate with @JohnNosta, asking why something so obvious is overlooked by the industry: the desire to see a ghost in the machine is more persuasive than the cold reality of statistics.
He invokes the ELIZA effect, documented decades ago — humans projecting genuine understanding onto anthropomorphic machine output — and argues it's time to take it seriously.
The thread extends his critique of labs like Anthropic pushing personified model narratives: personhood is an interface choice, not an ontology.
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