Culture Magazine

ELIZA's Back: The Original Chatbot

By Bbenzon @bbenzon

From the website:

Welcome to the ELIZA Archaeology Project. This research project brings together an interdisciplinary team of scholars, artists, and programmers to explore the history and ideas around the ELIZA chatbot.

ELIZA is the original and highly influential chatbot that launched the genre of human-computer interactions using text-based agents. It was created at MIT in the 1960s as part of Project MAC by its designer and programmer, Joseph Weizenbaum, the program not only allowed Wizenbaum to develop a mode of interaction with computers that is highly interactive, it also contributed to the way in which people were starting to conceptualize computers as having the capacity to usefully engage in conversation. You can try an accurate reimplementation of ELIZA developed as part of this project.

Here's a screen shot of the beginning of the dialog that Joseph Weizenbaum published in the article he published in Communications of the ACM (CACM) in which he explained ELIZA.

ELIZA's back: The original chatbot

You can replay the whole dialog, or initiate one of your own. Note that Weizenbaum didn't publish the dialog in the form of screen shots. That technology didn't exist back in 1966.

Has someone already linked ELIZA to one of the current chatbots? If not, how soon now?


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