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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsSo this is not uninteresting:
Yesterday, I flew out to California for a family wedding, and I had a fascinating experience on the plane. I was sitting in the middle seat and a very nice lady, about 80 years of age or so, sat herself down for the 5+ hour flight. She was a tiny bit intrusive but actually was really delightful, telling funny and entertaining stories of her life which was rather fascinating, asked us questions which were wholly appropriate and responding with perfectly formed follow-ups. Her son, sitting across from her on the aisle was traveling with her and minding his own business.
Around 7P.M. EDT she began asking me questions which were identical to those “asked and answered” already, and my eyebrow raised a mite. A few minutes later she began repeating herself and telling the same stories and asking the same questions over and over and by the time we disembarked in Phoenix where she was going and we were changing planes, she was literally repeating herself nonstop almost as though she had a superimposed pressure of speech on top of her sundowning. Tragic for her and her family and to a lesser extent for me, who stayed perfectly polite throughout this frustrating experience.
Anyone who would have met her would have assumed that she was in perfect cognitive shape. Short visits would not give a clue of the underlying problems, and I could only assume that if she were President, she too would have to leave the G7.
So there.
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pandr32
(13,100 posts)It is like a loop. My kids and I used to grab each other as stand-ins as we made our own escapes. She would just continue on.
usonian
(18,458 posts)https://www.techdirt.com/2025/04/29/the-hallucinating-chatgpt-presidency/
This pattern becomes impossible to unsee once you start looking for it. In his recent Time Magazine interview, Trump demonstrates exactly how this works. The process is remarkably consistent:
• A journalist asks a specific question about policy or events
• Trump, clearly unfamiliar with the actual details, activates his response generator
• Out comes a stream of confident-sounding words that maintain just enough semantic connection to the question to seem like an answer
• The response optimizes for what Trump thinks his audience wants to hear, rather than for accuracy or truth
You can pick almost any exchange from the interview to see this in action. He hits his talking points, but when pushed on things, he just starts making random wild claims with no basis in reality.
PCIntern
(27,410 posts)
Liberal In Texas
(15,326 posts)"We're studying that." "We have our best people on it."
"I'm not telling you what our plans are...besides you're fake news, who are you with..."
"That was a nasty question."
mopinko
(72,702 posts)
bif
(25,697 posts)And his cult have no idea he never answers the questions or says anything original. Clueless, the whole lot of them.
BidenRocks
(1,672 posts)In two weeks!
Ilsa
(62,907 posts)One of the stupidest things I've ever heard.
NNadir
(36,041 posts)I'm sure it would garner a lot of attention and recs.
littlemissmartypants
(28,132 posts)usonian
(18,458 posts)Last edited Thu Jun 19, 2025, 03:21 PM - Edit history (1)
https://upload.democraticunderground.com/100220281483It's so hard keeping good stuff 🦵 kicked 🦵 here!
I just kicked it with a bonus hallucination!
And there's also the "He's George Costanza" version.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220357421
What a day. I also found the article I was looking for.
AI Chatbots Repeat Russian Disinformation at Scale
in the thread.
Thanks!
littlemissmartypants
(28,132 posts) 
calimary
(86,711 posts)It certainly illuminates things.
And than you for this thread, PCIntern! For the same reason.
Beartracks
(13,928 posts)usonian
(18,458 posts)Already done and I kicked it today with a new hallucination.
THANKS!
DENVERPOPS
(12,667 posts)is a byproduct of him being totally delusional, which he needs, to reinforce him being a psychopath, which includes being a pathological liar......
ms liberty
(10,302 posts)• A journalist asks a specific question about policy or events
• Trump, clearly unfamiliar with the actual details, activates his response generator
• Out comes a stream of confident-sounding words that maintain just enough semantic connection to the question to seem like an answer
• The response optimizes for what Trump thinks his audience wants to hear, rather than for accuracy or truth
He never has any details, any specifics, any information in his commentary that indicates any real understanding of the issue he's discussing.
eppur_se_muova
(39,160 posts)Computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum was there at the dawn of artificial intelligence – but he was also adamant that we must never confuse computers with humans
By Ben Tarnoff
Tue 25 Jul 2023 00.00 EDT
Last modified on Fri 1 Sep 2023 00.00 EDT
In 1966, an MIT professor named Joseph Weizenbaum created the first chatbot. He cast it in the role of a psychotherapist. A user would type a message on an electric typewriter connected to a mainframe. After a moment, the “psychotherapist” would reply.
User: Men are all alike.
Chatbot: IN WHAT WAY
User: They’re always bugging us about something or other.
Chatbot: CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE
User: Well, my boyfriend made me come here.
Chatbot: YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE
User: He says I’m depressed much of the time.
Chatbot: I AM SORRY TO HEAR YOU ARE DEPRESSED
Weizenbaum published this sample exchange in a journal article that explained how the chatbot worked. The software was relatively simple. It looked at the user input and applied a set of rules to generate a plausible response. He called the program Eliza, after Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion. The cockney flower girl in George Bernard Shaw’s play uses language to produce an illusion: she elevates her elocution to the point where she can pass for a duchess. Similarly, Eliza would speak in such a way as to produce the illusion that it understood the person sitting at the typewriter.
“Some subjects have been very hard to convince that Eliza (with its present script) is not human,” Weizenbaum wrote. In a follow-up article that appeared the next year, he was more specific: one day, he said, his secretary requested some time with Eliza. After a few moments, she asked Weizenbaum to leave the room. “I believe this anecdote testifies to the success with which the program maintains the illusion of understanding,” he noted.
Eliza isn’t exactly obscure. It caused a stir at the time – the Boston Globe sent a reporter to go and sit at the typewriter and ran an excerpt of the conversation – and remains one of the best known developments in the history of computing. More recently, the release of ChatGPT has renewed interest in it. In the last year, Eliza has been invoked in the Guardian, the New York Times, the Atlantic and elsewhere. The reason that people are still thinking about a piece of software that is nearly 60 years old has nothing to do with its technical aspects, which weren’t terribly sophisticated even by the standards of its time. Rather, Eliza illuminated a mechanism of the human mind that strongly affects how we relate to computers.
Early in his career, Sigmund Freud noticed that his patients kept falling in love with him. It wasn’t because he was exceptionally charming or good-looking, he concluded. Instead, something more interesting was going on: transference. Briefly, transference refers to our tendency to project feelings about someone from our past on to someone in our present. While it is amplified by being in psychoanalysis, it is a feature of all relationships. When we interact with other people, we always bring a group of ghosts to the encounter. The residue of our earlier life, and above all our childhood, is the screen through which we see one another.
***
more: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/25/joseph-weizenbaum-inventor-eliza-chatbot-turned-against-artificial-intelligence-ai
When PCs first started moving into homes, I remember even kids could get a copy of ELIZA and run it on those simple 80's platforms. So it can't be all that complicated. I wonder how hard it would be to "blowgrade" ELIZA into a ChatDJT that gives authentic-sounding Trumpian responses ? Make it into viral shareware and see how much people get out of comparing DJT's actual pronouncements with the slop from ChatDJT -- would that discredit Turnip in some diehards' eyes ?
Danascot
(5,060 posts)Just load his stock phrases into a pull-string doll and it would be just as coherent as the real thing.
godsentme
(146 posts)She sounded perfectly lucid. If you didn't know her, short conversations would seem very normal. I've often thought of this in reference to TSF.
ShazzieB
(20,935 posts)The first sign of her encroaching dementia was asking the same questions and telling the same stories over and over again. We were too naive to realize what was going on at first (and my fil was pretty much in denial for a long time), but as things progressed, I could look back and see that behavior for what it was in hindsight.
I regret being so oblivious at the time, but it was my husband's and my first experience with someone in that state, and we were just clueless. In those early stages, her personality hadn't changed noticeably, and we just thought she was extremely, annoyingly absent-minded. Eventually, the signs became much more obvious, and looking back I feel like we maybe should have caught on much faster than we did, but it's amazing what you can miss when you don't know what to look for.
skydive forever
(495 posts)She could seem perfectly normal, and then she would say something way out there. Brain injuries SUCK!
littlemissmartypants
(28,132 posts)Which means all of the parts of speech and basic coherent sentences are there but it's not attached to reality or anything meaningful.
A little something that I learnt in college.
❤️
eppur_se_muova
(39,160 posts)I think it was Noam Chomsky who came us with this, after being challenged to construct a sentence which was syntactically and grammatically correct, but which conveyed no information.
littlemissmartypants
(28,132 posts)She taught me a lot.
Magoo48
(6,450 posts)She carries on the banter which accompanies our relationship with wit and continuity. As soon as we are finished with an exchange, she has no recollection of it. The long goodbye, yes, it is indeed.
NNadir
(36,041 posts)Magoo48
(6,450 posts)Thanks for asking. I have people I can talk to, and children who support me in different ways. We’ve been married for 45 years, it’s a very personal effort for me, caring for her. Nevertheless, I feel like I’ll know when time is up.
NNadir
(36,041 posts)...of the depth of my father's love for my mother as she was dying of a brain tumor, her mind unraveling day by day.
He made me understand what it is to be a man, something you clearly know quite well.
I was in awe of him and I am similarly in awe of anyone with such depth of love.
yellow dahlia
(2,552 posts)Taking care of someone in their last years, who is in need of caretaking, is a gift to them. And it also becomes a gift from them to you - you will always have that connection. I am having difficulty explaining it, but you will feel it...I'm sure.
LoisB
(10,810 posts)
area51
(12,346 posts)My mother had dementia.
Totally Tunsie
(10,960 posts)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundowning#:~:text=Sundowning%2C%20or%20sundown%20syndrome%2C%20is,late%20afternoon%20and%20early%20evening.
Sundowning, or sundown syndrome,[1] is a neurological phenomenon wherein people with delirium or some form of dementia experience increased confusion and restlessness beginning in the late afternoon and early evening. It is most commonly associated with Alzheimer's disease but is also found in those with other forms of dementia. The term sundowning was coined by nurse Lois K. Evans in 1987 due to the association between the person's increased confusion and the setting of the sun.[2][3]
*snip*
For people with sundown syndrome, a multitude of behavioral problems begin to occur and are associated with long-term adverse outcomes.[4][5][6][7] Sundowning seems to occur more frequently during the middle stages of Alzheimer's disease and mixed dementia and seems to subside with the progression of the person's dementia.[4][5] People are generally able to understand that this behavioral pattern is abnormal. Research shows that 20–45% of people with Alzheimer's will experience some variation of sundowning confusion.[4][8] However, despite lack of an official diagnosis of sundown syndrome in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5), there is currently a wide range of reported prevalence.[2]
DENVERPOPS
(12,667 posts)Trump, to counteract that, starts binging on Adderall after dinner, and keeps it going until 3am with his barrage of messaging. That is the reason he has "Personal Time" every morning to get some sleep....
PCIntern
(27,410 posts)I did use that term in the OP and thanks for the elucidation for others
Totally Tunsie
(10,960 posts)I must be afternooning! Duh.
bif
(25,697 posts)That he had sundowners, sunrisers, sunafternooners, etc...
Deep State Witch
(11,920 posts)She was definitely sundowning.
usonian
(18,458 posts)I shifted the thread a bit by focusing on someone who is supposed to be alert but who speaks in echoes.
I lost a brilliant neighbor to Alzheimers and it hurt to see him unable to communicate even at the level discussed here.
Skittles
(165,095 posts)I ask them different questions - about where they were, who they were with, maybe even who was president then?
I figure it's a good memory for them and asking them questions changes the response a bit which may change the narrative somewhat.
Moostache
(10,607 posts)He has dementia (diagnosed) and is in terminal decline at 82 years old. He seems to be fine at the beginning of any exchange or conversation, but within a few minutes he begins to lose the plot and begins repeating himself. Asking the same question 3, 4, 5 times in a 10 minute stretch, getting stuck on one detail and losing the ability to focus on other details.
If things persist for too long, he begins to get nervous and shifts his weight a lot (as if sitting is becoming painful) and gets a confused appearance and demeanor, sometimes agitation and anger join the party too. I have learned to adapt to him as best I can and communicate in short, declarative sentences and nothing more than a 3 or 4 sentence story / update. Sundowning is also VERY real and VERY confusing for him. He has a terrible time during the evening hours and also with his sleep patterns - often getting into patterns where he tries to go to sleep at 3PM and is wide awake and wandering his facility at 3 AM.
Its heart breaking and deveastating to live through and watch while being powerless to help. Over the last 5 years, my dad has lost my mother (his wife of 53 years), his home (after a stroke left him remarkably intact but unable to be left alone and we had him move 5 hours closer to my sister and I), his independence (when we had no choice but to take his car keys as he was no loner able to drive safely at all), his continence (which was robbed from him by bladder cancer and advancing issues elsewhere) and his mobility (when a fall resulted in a broken hip). Through it all, he has been remarkably resilient and physically recovered from all of it prior to the hip injury. That ended his mobility for good at this point.
Since last summer, he has been fading more rapidly and retreating deeper into the haze of dementia more and more. I visit him twice a week and he doesn't remember the weekday visit by Saturday or the weekend visit by the next week. He has forgotten his grandchildren's names and ages and is receeding deeper by the week. Watching all of this is eerily similar to what happened with my grandmother (his mother) a decade ago. She too had dementia and she lasted 17 years in a care facility and had no idea who any of us were by the 7th year there. By the end, she did not know my dad, her name, where she was, how long she had been there...nothing, just a blank slate. Her decline began around age 80. My dad's issues truthfully began at least a decade ago, but he had my mom until 2020 to cover for him and guide him and remind him of things. Since her passing, he has been adrift in every way imaginable.
All of this weighs on me daily like a ton of bricks. I have started a ghoulish countdown in my own head of the 26 years I MAY have left of good cognition and a reason to keep living. I won't make it that far and I know it. I have health maladies that don't presage a lifespan into the mid-80s or beyond, and given what I have witnessed and seen and lived through twice now, I don't want those years anyway. The humiliation and degradation that my father's eyes reflect every time he can't remember something or is in need of toilet care breaks me and leaves me wishing for no part of this dreaded family tradition.
This past father's day, I became the oldest thing remaining in my dad's life. He was 27 when he lost his father (in 1970, 6 weeks before I was born), a husband for 53 years (until 2020) and my father since 1971 - now 54 years ago. I cherish the time we had, but I mourn his slow, irreversible decline and losing him a piece at a time now hating myself for finding excuses to stay away from his facility at times because I am too weak to take it again. When I was younger I used to fear dying too young, now that I am older I fear living too long. It sucks. The only thing that makes it at all bearable is when I can bring up a memory that he still has command of and the light that comes back on however briefly...I just wish I was better at that than I am.
erronis
(20,213 posts)I feel the same way about "living too long" and hope I have the wherewithal to not have to go there.
Totally Tunsie
(10,960 posts)This comment particularly hits home to me: "When I was younger I used to fear dying too young, now that I am older I fear living too long." Words so true.
Thank you for your very insightful post. Hugs to you, Moostache.
Kid Berwyn
(20,769 posts)Your seat mate, no matter how many connections her mind has lost due to time and circumstance, sounds like she is still a good person: "one who cares about others."
The traitor "who cares only for himself" ran ran ran away from Banff when confronted by others who could see his inadequacy.
Totally Tunsie
(10,960 posts)That's EXACTLY why he left. His "concerns" about Iran were non-existent. As always, it was only about his
fee-fees. Whatta' Loser!
WestMichRad
(2,347 posts)… when I spent a full day with my father. It was very out of the ordinary for him. Found out several days later that he had suffered a mini-stroke that led to this impairment.
Fortunately for all, it didn’t appear to have any long duration effects… he was very lucky. Lived another 25 years in fairly good health throughout.
Fiddlelady11
(65 posts)She wasn’t even 65. I didn’t realize what was going on with her until we were in a store and she handed me her cash to pay. She couldn’t count it.