![]() ![]() ![]() In this book, he argues that the Eliza effect signifies a broader pathology afflicting “modern man.” In a world conquered by science, technology, and capitalism, people had grown accustomed to viewing themselves as isolated cogs in a large and uncaring machine. This insight was a profound shock for Weizenbaum, and one that came to define his intellectual trajectory over the next decade. Weizenbaum called this the Eliza effect, and believed it was a type of “delusional thinking” that humanity would collectively suffer from in the digital age. In his paper, entitled “ Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Turing suggested that if a computer could conduct a convincingly human conversation in text, one could assume it was intelligent-an idea that became the basis of the famous Turing Test.īut Eliza demonstrated that convincing communication between a human and a machine could take place even if comprehension only flowed from one side: The simulation of intelligence, rather than intelligence itself, was enough to fool people. Weizenbaum was most troubled when his secretary, who had watched him build the program from scratch over many months, insisted that he leave the room so she could talk to Eliza in private.įor Weizenbaum, this experiment with Eliza made him question an idea that Alan Turing had proposed in 1950 about machine intelligence. They would open up to the machine and confess problems they were facing in their lives and relationships.ĭuring their brief interactions with Eliza, many users began forming emotional attachments to the algorithm.Įven more surprising was that this sense of intimacy persisted even after Weizenbaum described how the machine worked and explained that it didn’t really understand anything that was being said. He noticed, with some concern, that during their brief interactions with Eliza, many users began forming emotional attachments to the algorithm. To test Eliza’s capacity to engage an interlocutor, Weizenbaum invited students and colleagues into his office and let them chat with the machine while he looked on. It created the illusion of comprehension and engagement in a mere 200 lines of code. Weizenbaum chose this mode of dialogue for Eliza because it gave the impression that the computer understood what was being said without having to offer anything new to the conversation. Human: He says I’m depressed much of the time.Ĭomputer: I AM SORRY TO HEAR YOU ARE DEPRESSED Human: Well, my boyfriend made me come here.Ĭomputer: YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE Human: They’re always bugging us about something or other.Ĭomputer: CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE? (Notice how the program takes keywords like “boyfriend” and “depressed” and re-uses them.) The program would take something the user said and reflect it back with a question, as can be seen in the example below. To encourage ongoing dialogue, Weizenbaum designed Eliza to simulate the type of conversational style used by a Rogerian psychoanalyst. Eliza scanned the message for the presence of a keyword and used it in a new sentence to form a response that was sent back, printed out, and read by the user. When the user typed in a sentence and pressed enter, a message was sent to the mainframe computer. The new Eliza was written for the 36-bit IBM 7094, an early transistorized mainframe computer, in a programming language that Weizenbaum developed called MAD-SLIP.īecause computer time was a valuable resource, Eliza could only be run via a time-sharing system the user interacted with the program remotely via an electric typewriter and printer. He named the program Eliza after Eliza Doolittle, the working-class hero of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion who learns how to talk with an upper-class accent. As Weizenbaum explained, his program made “certain kinds of natural-language conversation between man and computer possible.” While there were already some rudimentary digital language generators in existence-programs that could spit out somewhat coherent lines of text-Weizenbaum’s program was the first designed explicitly for interactions with humans. The user could type in some statement or set of statements in their normal language, press enter, and receive a response from the machine. This is part four of a six-part series on the history of natural language processing.īetween 19, Joseph Weizenbaum, a German American computer scientist at MIT’s artificial intelligence lab, developed the first-ever chatbot .
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