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The title wordplay dates back to at least Drew McDermott's 1976 essay "Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Stupidity" [0]. The intro is phenomenal.

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> As a field, artificial intelligence has always been on the border of respectability, and therefore on the border of crackpottery. Many critics <Dreyfus, 1972>, <Lighthill, 1973> have urged that we are over the border. We have been very defensive toward this charge, drawing ourselves up with dignity when it is made and folding the cloak of Science about us. On the other hand, in private, we have been justifiably proud of our willingness to explore weird ideas, because pursuing them is the only way to make progress.

> Unfortunately, the necessity for speculation has combined with the culture of the hacker in computer science <Weizenbaum, 1975> to cripple our self-discipline. In a young field, ,self-discipline is not necessarily a virtue, but we are not getting any younger. In the past few years, our tolerance of sloppy thinking has led us to repeat many mistakes over and over. If we are to retain any credibility, this should stop.

> This paper is an effort to ridicule some of these mistakes.

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[0]: Drew McDermott. 1976. Artificial intelligence meets natural stupidity. SIGART Bull., 57 (April 1976), 4–9. https://doi.org/10.1145/1045339.1045340

discuss

johnohara|2 years ago

>In this paper, I have criticized AI researchers very harshly. Let me express my faith that people in other fields would, on inspection, be found to suffer from equally bad faults. Most AI workers are responsible people who are aware of the pitfalls of a difficult field and produce good work in spite of them. However, to say anything good about anyone is beyond the scope of this paper.

This paragraph concludes the section titled "Benediction." Ouch.

EdwardDiego|2 years ago

There's also a great line in a Terry Pratchett novel, Hogfather:

> Natural stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.

totetsu|2 years ago

Now that you mention it the way Hex was used at the UU was a good prediction of how were interacting with LLMs.