Emacs NSA bait [LWN.net]

Emacs NSA bait

Posted Feb 16, 2026 19:20 UTC (Mon) by excors (subscriber, #95769)
In reply to: Emacs NSA bait by karkhaz
Parent article: Poisoning scraperbots with iocaine

> I do nowadays wonder whether the stories of people being convinced by ELIZA are entirely fabricated or at least exaggerated.

I can believe it, because people seem to be really bad at judging intelligence. There's a recent paper "Large Language Models Pass the Turing Test" (https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674) where participants had five-minute conversations with a pair of one human and one AI, and had to guess which was human. A suitably-prompted ChatGPT (imitating a young nerd with poor writing skills) was significantly more convincing than the actual humans, winning 73% of the time. But even ELIZA won 23% of the time.

Like, a quarter of people were convinced by a dumb algorithm that responded to every question with either a verbatim echo of the question or a vague unrelated question of its own, even when they were specifically tasked with identifying the non-human. They liked its "question handling" and "personality traits" and apparently didn't mind it was all empty words. (Outside of the test, I guess that helps explain why so many people are tricked by LLMs that are far more sophisticated at echoing and validating their delusional thoughts while they fall down a rabbit hole.)

to post comments

Emacs NSA bait

Posted Feb 17, 2026 9:13 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Note, too, that the claim is not "everyone was convinced by ELIZA some of the time", but rather "some people were convinced by ELIZA some of the time".

To misquote an apocryphal quote, "there's a huge overlap between ELIZA's best output, and what people think someone really dumb would say"; the Turing Test was still in vogue when ELIZA was new, and under the rules of the test, you are "convinced" by ELIZA if you cannot determine whether you're conversing with a human, or with a bot to an extent better than random guessing - but that means that you count as "convinced" if you erroneously identify humans as the bot repeatedly.