The First Chatbot’s Multiple Personalities

elseif has not written about this yet · IEEE Spectrum describes it this way

ELIZA is remembered as the world’s first AI star, a kindly therapist in chatbot form that gently probed users’ worries. Even its creator, Joseph Weizenbaum, was surprised by the warm reception given to his experiment in human-machine interaction. For some, it heralded an age of automated psychotherapy, while others believed the program demonstrated sentience, a fallacy soon known as the “ELIZA effect.” Based on published descriptions, ELIZA has been implemented on many different computers, but only recently has the actual source code been unearthed from MIT’s archives. In Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI, just published by MIT Press, a squad of researchers analyze the code and reveal a complex program capable of much more than faking psychiatry. In fact, it could assume several different personas. The authors have also created a faithful emulation of the therapist persona that you can try yourself after reading the book excerpt below.When it debuted in the mid-1960s, the ELIZA software program transformed the way people thought about interacting with computers. As the first chatbot, ELIZA demonstrated how a calculation machine might engage in conversat