The Chatbot That Foretold Why People Share Secrets With ChatGPT
In the 60 years that ELIZA has been influencing computation and culture, conventional accounts portray it as the earliest example of what we now call chatbots, one that could converse as an automated psychologist. The deceptively simple program is known for “fooling” even the secretary who watched MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum create it. That’s how the story goes.
However, in all those accounts—even after all its adaptations across programming languages and research fields, in classrooms and popular culture—one essential piece of the story has been missing: the source code for the ELIZA program itself. Our new book, Inventing ELIZA, recovers this source code from the MIT Archives, offering for the first time a close reading and discussion of that code along with newly uncovered dialogs for ELIZA scripts beyond its popular “DOCTOR” persona.
This investigation revealed many ELIZAs: in its different program versions, designed to run a wide...
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