The first chatbot ELIZA has recently been revived by programmers.

The first chatbot ELIZA has recently been revived by programmers.

The first chatbot, known as ELIZA, has been revived by programmers. Some experts consider it a precursor to AI. However, the living developer just laughs. ELIZA is a simple program created in the 1960s by Joseph Weizenbaum, who was a professor at MIT. He was interested in the integration of humans and machines, which led to the development of ELIZA. It was a generalized conversation program that allowed a human to communicate with a computer. The program could run scripts with various language rules to represent different conversational personas. Weizenbaum named this early natural language processing program ELIZA after Eliza Doolittle from George Bernard Shaw’s play “Pygmalion,” in which a commoner learns to speak English with the diction characteristic of the upper class, despite her working-class background. Modern large language model AI systems, such as ChatGPT and Deepseek, are programmed to fill in gaps or answer questions. ELIZA, with its DOCTOR script, was programmed to encourage the user to continue the conversation. He wrote the first and most famous script for running on ELIZA, called “DOCTOR,” to simulate the first interview between a patient and a psychotherapist. It responded to user input by selecting key words and reflecting them back in a friendly manner. Here is an excerpt from a conversation between his program and a patient: User: “All men are the same.” ELIZA: “HOW” User: “They always get to us one way or another.” ELIZA: “CAN YOU GIVE A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE” User: “Well, my boyfriend made me come here.” ELIZA: “YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE” User: “He says I’m depressed most of the time.” ELIZA: “I’M SORRY TO HEAR THAT YOU’RE DEPRESSED.” Unlike modern chatbots, which use large language models and are trained on vast language databases to generate responses, ELIZA, developed three decades before the term “chatbot” was coined, had little data to rely on. The DOCTOR script would look for keywords in the user’s response and mirror them in its reply. If a keyword was not detected, the script would simply offer a generic response. ELIZA was programmed to encourage the user to continue the conversation. This created the impression that it was a good listener, which is important in psychotherapy, and made the program a huge sensation.

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