As a player in AI since nearly its beginning, I knew the story of Eliza, and quoted its value and its cautions many times. In talks, development and training. In the chatbots we built to join our brand equity. Today in IEEE Spectrum, a very good piece on Eliza. everyone should know at least this much of the story of this early chatbot. Especially how it taught us unexpected things about interactions between humans and robots. (below an intro, complete article at link)
Why People Demanded Privacy to Confide in the World’s First Chatbot
In 1966, the Eliza program couldn’t say much—but it was enough
By Oscar Schwartz
Computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum with his chatbot Eliza, running on a 36-bit IBM 7094 mainframe computer. ....
Between 1964 and 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum, a German American computer scientist at MIT’s artificial intelligence lab, developed the first-ever chatbot [PDF].
While there were already some rudimentary digital language generators in existence—programs that could spit out somewhat coherent lines of text—Weizenbaum’s program was the first designed explicitly for interactions with humans. The user could type in some statement or set of statements in their normal language, press enter, and receive a response from the machine. As Weizenbaum explained, his program made “certain kinds of natural-language conversation between man and computer possible.”
He named the program Eliza after Eliza Doolittle, the working-class hero of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion who learns how to talk with an upper-class accent. The new Eliza was written for the 36-bit IBM 7094, an early transistorized mainframe computer, in a programming language that Weizenbaum developed called MAD-SLIP. .... "
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