What happens when you ask a question
- Checks. Your question is checked for length, and each visitor can ask a limited number of questions an hour, so that Alice stays available for everyone.
- Search. On the Society’s own server, Alice turns your question into a “fingerprint” of its meaning and compares it with around two thousand passages from the Society’s pages, matching both meaning and exact words.
- Select. She picks the six passages that fit best, taking no more than two from any one document, so a single long paper can’t crowd out the rest.
- Write. Those passages, your question and Alice’s instructions go to a language model, which writes a short answer using only those passages and numbering its sources.
- Show. You see the answer, the numbered sources under “What Alice read”, and a way to tell us whether it helped.
… and your feedback closes the loop: the Society reads the comments, fixes pages or adds material, and Alice’s next answer improves.
What Alice reads
- The Society’s current website, cybsoc.org
- The two archive sites, archive.cybsoc.org and archive2.cybsoc.org, including papers, conference programmes and newsletters held there
- Allenna Leonard’s Coming Concepts: The Cybernetic Glossary for New Management (© Allenna Leonard 1990, revised 2004), used with permission and credited whenever Alice draws on it
- The text of a few archive flyers and posters, read from the images
Her reading is refreshed regularly, so new events and page changes reach her within days. She reads nothing else: not the wider web, and not members-only areas.
The archive sites are historical. Where they disagree with cybsoc.org, Alice follows the current site, and she flags answers that rely on archive pages, because they may be out of date.
Why she looks things up rather than “knowing” them
There are two broad ways to give an AI knowledge of a body of work:
Retrieval – what Alice does
She searches the Society’s material for each question and answers from what she finds. Every claim can be checked against its source; she can say “I can’t find that”; she stays current; and removing or correcting a page changes her answers straight away.
Training
The material is built into the model itself. It picks up the vocabulary and style, but it doesn’t reliably remember facts, can’t show where an answer came from, needs retraining for every update, and can’t easily “unlearn” anything.
For a guide whose answers people should be able to trust and check, retrieval is the better fit. The two can be combined, and the Society may test that in future.
The language model: Mistral
Alice’s answers are written by Mistral Small, from Mistral AI, a French company working under EU law and the GDPR. We chose it because it keeps processing within European data protection; its models are open-weight, so the Society is not locked in to one supplier; it is inexpensive, and we use prepaid credit so costs cannot overrun; and it answers faithfully from the passages it is given. The search step runs entirely on the Society’s own server.
Your privacy
- No account, sign-in or cookies are needed to use Alice.
- Your question and the passages Alice found are sent to Mistral to write the answer. The Society’s Mistral account has training switched off, so your questions are not used to train Mistral’s models.
- We keep a log of questions, with the sources used, to improve Alice. It holds no IP addresses, names or cookies. (As with any website, our web server also keeps routine access logs for security.)
- If you leave a comment, it is saved and emailed to the Society. An email address is optional, and if you give one it is used only to reply to that comment.
- Please don’t put personal or sensitive information in your questions.
Her limits
- She can only be as good as the pages she reads. If something isn’t in the Society’s pages, she can’t answer it – and should say so.
- She can still make mistakes: misreading a passage, or joining two together badly. Her sources are there so you can check.
- She is a guide, not the Society’s official voice, and she can’t make commitments on its behalf.
Why “Alice”?
After Lewis Carroll’s Alice, who asks questions, follows them down unexpected paths, and is never quite satisfied with an answer she can’t make sense of. She first appeared as “Cyber Alice” in one of the Society’s video updates. It seemed the right spirit for a guide to cybernetics: curious, conversational, and aware that what you see depends on how you look.
Tell us what you think
Under every answer you can say whether it helped and leave a comment. Corrections, gaps and suggestions all reach the Society directly, and they are how Alice gets better.
Ask Alice a question