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Why Joseph Weizenbaum Invented the Eliza Chatbot

smithsonianmag.com · 2,842 words · saved by 1 readers

“Men are all alike,” one participant said. “In what way?” the other prompted. The reply: “They’re always bugging us about something or other.” The exchange continued in this vein for some time, seemingly capturing an empathetic listener coaxing the speaker for details. But this mid-1960s conversation came with a catch: The listener wasn’t human. Its name was Eliza, and it was a computer program that is now recognized as the first chatbot, a software application capable of engaging in conversation with humans. (The term itself emerged much later, in the 1990s, as an abbreviation for “chatterbot.”) Six decades after Eliza’s creation, the program’s inventor, Joseph Weizenbaum, is perhaps best remembered for spending the rest of his life warning the public of the dangers posed by such convincing technology. When Weizenbaum, then a professor at MIT, wrote code that could mimic human language, his goal was to demonstrate technical capacity, not to illuminate human reaction to it. He thought

MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum developed Eliza in the mid-1960s. His views on artificial intelligence were often at odds with many of his fellow pioneers in the field. Illustration by Meilan Solly / Images via Newspapers.com , Adobe Stock and MIT It could have been a heart-to-heart between friends. “Men are all alike,” one participant said . “In what way?” the other prompted. The reply: “They’re always bugging us about something or other.” The exchange continued in this vein for some time, seemingly capturing an empathetic listener coaxing the speaker for details. But this mid-1960s conversat

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