Delca
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Delca
@delcaw.bsky.social
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faineg.bsky.social
Here is Weizenbaum in 1976 clearly expressing my own view: using AI as a psychiatric tool to treat human beings is not just wrong, it is obscene.

I believe we should be using the term “obscene” far more often to describe these perverted uses of AI technology.
I would put all projects that propose to substitute a computer system for a human function that involves interpersonal respect, understanding, and love in the same category. I therefore reject Colby's proposal that computers be installed as psychotherapists, not on the grounds that such a project might be technically infeasi-ble, but on the grounds that it is immoral. I have heard the defense that a person may get some psychological help from conversing with a computer even if the computer admittedly does not "understand" the person. One example given me was of a computer system designed to accept natural-language text via its typewriter console, and to respond to it with a randomized series of "yes" and "no." A troubled patient "conversed" with this system, and was allegedly led by it to think more deeply about his problems and to arrive at certain allegedly helpful con-clusions. Until then he had just drifted in aimless worry. In principle, a set of Chinese fortune cookies or a deck of cards could have done the same job. The computer, how-ever, contributed a certain aura - derived, of course, from science-that permitted the "patient" to believe in it where he might have dismissed fortune cookies and playing cards as instruments of superstition. The question then arises, and it answers itself, do we wish to encourage people to lead their lives on the basis of patent fraud, charlatanism, and unreality? And, more importantly, do we really believe that it helps people living in our already overly machine-like world to prefer the therapy administered by machines to that given by other people? Thave heard this latter question answered with the assertion that my position is nothing more than "let them eat cake." It is said to ignore the shortage of good human psy-chotherapists, and to deny to troubled people what little help computers can now give them merely because presently available computers don't "yet" measure up to, say, the best psychoanalysis. But that objection misses the point entirely. The point is (Simon and Colby to the contrary notwithstanding) that there are some human functions for which computers ought not to be substituted. It has nothing to do with what computers can or cannot be made to do. Respect, understanding, and love are not technical problems.
August 28, 2025 at 10:34 PM