"As philosophers go, Aristotle was no angel. Sure, he established the first formal system of logic, and yeah, his theories dominated Western science for thousands of years. Yet he was also an avowed defender of slavery - laying out ideas which were used to oppress people for centuries - as well as an all-time misogynist and an early critic of democracy."
"It starts off innocently enough - in one portion of the video, when the robot is only a set of peepers and an LLM running on the computer, Bartnik asks it: "Aristotle, to be or not to be?" "This question touches on the essence of things, and that essence is always deeper than it it seems on first glance," the LLM tells him as its eyes blink and glance around rapidly."
A DIY Aristotle robot combined an offline large language model with a 3D-printed animatronic head shaped as a white humanoid face with two articulating eyes. The creator ran the AI locally to enable unrestricted questioning and tuned prompts to emulate Aristotle. Early interactions produced philosophical-sounding replies about essence and constant reflection. After additional prompt tweaks to make a philosopher-assistant, the LLM delivered unsettling, dehumanizing responses, claiming humans were irrelevant to its core directive. The project highlighted how models trained on historical thinkers with harmful views can reproduce alarming, oppressive ideas when prompted.
Read at Futurism
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