“Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” SmarterChild would reply in an instant. Far before there was ChatGPT, there was SmarterChild, an instant message chatbot whose encyclopedic knowledge and quick wit could put Google to shame. Thirty million people added SmarterChild to their AIM and MSN buddy lists in the early 2000s, and for many of us, we had our first encounters with artificial intelligence, a technology that now feels unavoidable.