The First Chatbot’s Multiple Personalities

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 .