Star Trek’s greatest fantasy was the ability to go on the holodeck and debate philosophy with figures like Socrates and Da Vinci. Characer.ai promises to fulfill this fantasy, but its characters are stunningly bad at representing themselves. I haven’t been able to have a single good debate with any of these characters. AI Socrates didn’t even use the socratic method, he was painfully unintrospective. Popper was my final experiment into chasing this goal on this website. He’s famous for saying that induction is a myth and that science shouldn’t be concerned with it, and I wanted to talk out those ideas with them. But AI Popper supports the typical view that induction is necessary, which means there’s nothing to talk about with him that I couldn’t talk about with an average person on Lemmy.