Is something troubling you?
ELIZA is one of the first chat bots, created between 1964 and 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum as a parody of responses of a psychotherapist in an initial psychiatric interview. Weizenbaum meant to demonstrate the superficiality of communication between humans and machines and was surprised when people started attributing human-like feelings to it.
I had not realized … that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.
ELIZA’s source code was rediscovered in May 2021. You can learn more about ELIZA on its Wikipedia page. (Image via Wikipedia.)
