A conversation in the ELIZA chatbot, the first in the world.
Half a century before ChatGPT, we had ELIZA. The world’s first chatbot, psychotherapist “Doctor”, returned from the dead, 60 years later.
ELIZAthe world’s first chatbot, is back from the dead, 60 years later.
In a nostalgic homage to the history of Artificial Intelligence, a team of programmers has resurrected the groundbreaking program that was named in honor of Eliza Doolittle of Pygmalion.
The original ELIZA code had been considered lost with the evolution of programming languages, until in 2021, Jeff Shragerenthusiasta da IA, b Myles Crowleyan MIT archivist, discovered a complete copy of the source code in Weizenbaum’s documents, according to .
With permission from the Weizenbaum estate, a team led by Shrager meticulously rebuilt the program, a process that involved cleaning and debugging the code, installing stacks of emulators, and even developing new functions to replace missing components, according to article on arXIV on January 12th.
Developed in the 1960s by Joseph Weizenbaum no WITHwith the aim of exploring communication between humans and machines, ELIZA, considered the basis for modern AI systems, simulated human conversations with simple natural language processing techniques, based on pre-programmed scripts that analyzed the words of the user and, based on them, generated automatic responses.
The program became famous for its script Rogerian psychotherapistthe “Doctor”, which reflected users’ statements, encouraging self-exploration. Some users have reported mistaking the program for a real therapist.
For example, if someone wrote “I’m sad,” ELIZA could respond “Why are you sad?” — although in a much more rudimentary form than a current chatbot.
ELIZA could sometimes reveal truths that people avoided facing. Its influence persists in today’s AI, even though modern systems have surpassed its capabilities — sometimes controversially, given their potential for misinformation.
The “new” ELIZA (which can now be downloaded) stays true to its origins: it has almost identical answers to the original, but researchers found some typos in the revived program, such as its inability to process numbers without failing.
