ELIZA
In plain wordsA 1960s computer program that chatted by turning a user's own words back into questions, like a therapist. Many users felt understood, though the program understood nothing.
A keyword-driven conversation program that Joseph WeizenbaumJoseph Weizenbaum, prop. n.: A German-American computer scientist who built ELIZA, one of the first chatbots, and then became a leading critic of handing human judgment over to computers. wrote at MIT between 1964 and 1966, widely regarded as the first chatbotchatbot, n.: Software you chat with in ordinary language, by typing or talking, as you would with a person. The newest ones, such as ChatGPT, can answer questions, draft writing and keep long conversations going.. For each typed line it found the highest-ranked keyword, split the sentence with that keyword's decomposition rule and rebuilt the pieces into a reply with a reassembly rule, so a complaint about being unhappy might return as a question about the unhappiness; when no keyword matched, it used a stock phrase or revived an earlier remark. The rules came in interchangeable scripts. DOCTOR, the one that made the program famous, cast it as a therapist in Carl Rogers's client-centered style, a persona that can mirror a speaker's statements while knowing almost nothing about the world. Nothing in ELIZA modeled meaning: whatever understanding users perceived came from the rules and from their own reading of its replies.
Weizenbaum built ELIZA partly to show how shallow the appearance of understanding could be.
Origin
Named after Eliza Doolittle, the flower seller taught to speak 'properly' in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. Written in MAD-SLIP for the IBM 7094 time-sharing system of MIT's Project MAC and described in Communications of the ACM in January 1966. The original code was rediscovered in Weizenbaum's papers at MIT in 2021 and has since been restored to run.
Usage note
Weizenbaum was disturbed that users, including his secretary, confided in the program, and he became a leading critic of AI in Computer Power and Human Reason (1976). See ELIZA effectELIZA effect, n.: Our tendency to believe that a computer understands us, cares or thinks just because it produces humanlike words, even when it is only following simple rules..
Related
- ELIZA effectELIZA effect, n.: Our tendency to believe that a computer understands us, cares or thinks just because it produces humanlike words, even when it is only following simple rules.
- chatbotchatbot, n.: Software you chat with in ordinary language, by typing or talking, as you would with a person. The newest ones, such as ChatGPT, can answer questions, draft writing and keep long conversations going.
- Joseph WeizenbaumJoseph Weizenbaum, prop. n.: A German-American computer scientist who built ELIZA, one of the first chatbots, and then became a leading critic of handing human judgment over to computers.
- Turing testTuring test, n.: Alan Turing's proposed test of machine intelligence: a judge holds typed conversations with a hidden person and a hidden computer, and the computer passes if the judge cannot consistently pick it out.
- SHRDLUSHRDLU, prop. n.: A program from around 1970 that let people move toy blocks in a simulated world by typing ordinary English commands and questions, and that could explain what it had done and why.
- anthropomorphismanthropomorphism, n.: Treating something that isn't human — a pet, a car, a chatbot — as if it had human thoughts, feelings or intentions. AI that talks fluently makes this temptation unusually strong.
Sources
- Weizenbaum, J. (1966). ELIZA — A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine. Communications of the ACM 9(1), 36–45.
Mentioned in
chatbotchatbot, n.: Software you chat with in ordinary language, by typing or talking, as you would with a person. The newest ones, such as ChatGPT, can answer questions, draft writing and keep long conversations going., Turing testTuring test, n.: Alan Turing's proposed test of machine intelligence: a judge holds typed conversations with a hidden person and a hidden computer, and the computer passes if the judge cannot consistently pick it out., AI therapyAI therapy, n.: Using chatbots for emotional support or as a stand-in for a counselor or therapist, either through apps built for mental health or by confiding in general-purpose assistants., chat modelchat model, n.: A language model trained to hold a back-and-forth conversation, keeping track of who said what and replying as a helpful assistant. It is the engine inside chat apps., conversational AIconversational AI, n.: The technology that lets computers hold conversations with people in everyday language, by text or voice. It powers chatbots, voice assistants and automated customer-service lines., ELIZA effectELIZA effect, n.: Our tendency to believe that a computer understands us, cares or thinks just because it produces humanlike words, even when it is only following simple rules., Joseph WeizenbaumJoseph Weizenbaum, prop. n.: A German-American computer scientist who built ELIZA, one of the first chatbots, and then became a leading critic of handing human judgment over to computers., Loebner PrizeLoebner Prize, prop. n.: A yearly contest, held from 1991 to 2019, in which chatbots tried to convince judges they were human in short text chats. Its grand prize was never won, and critics called it a publicity stunt., MIT AI LabMIT AI Lab, prop. n.: The artificial intelligence laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founded in 1959 and one of the birthplaces of AI and hacker culture; it is now part of MIT's computer science lab, CSAIL., PARRYPARRY, prop. n.: An early-1970s chatbot built to talk like a psychiatric patient with paranoid schizophrenia. In tests, psychiatrists reading its conversations did little better than chance at telling it from real patients — an early Turing-test-style result., SHRDLUSHRDLU, prop. n.: A program from around 1970 that let people move toy blocks in a simulated world by typing ordinary English commands and questions, and that could explain what it had done and why.