Could a 1966 chatbot really make people believe they were talking to a therapist?
The world's first chatbot was so convincing that Weizenbaum's own secretary asked him to leave the room so she could talk privately.
The answer
ELIZA, created by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT in 1966, was one of the first natural language processing programs. Its most famous script, DOCTOR, simulated a Rogerian psychotherapist by using simple pattern matching and substitution rules to reflect users' statements back as questions. Despite having no real understanding, users formed deep emotional attachments - Weizenbaum's secretary reportedly asked him to leave the room during her sessions. The phenomenon, now called the 'ELIZA effect,' describes humans' tendency to attribute understanding to computer responses, and it profoundly disturbed Weizenbaum, who spent the rest of his career warning about over-trusting machines.
Source: MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
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