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In the 1960s an MIT professor named Joseph Weizenbaum created a chatbot called ELIZA. The conversations people had with it set precedents for the chatbots to come.

In the 60 years that ELIZA has been influencing computation and culture, conventional accounts portray it as the earliest example of what we now call chatbots , one that could converse as an automated psychologist. The deceptively simple program is known for “fooling” even the secretary who watched MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum create it. That’s how the story goes.

However, in all those accounts—even after all its adaptations across programming languages and research fields, in classrooms and popular culture—one essential piece of the story has been missing: the source code for the ELIZA program itself. Our new book, Inventing ELIZA , recovers this source code from the MIT Archives, offering for the first time a close reading and discussion of that code along with newly uncovered dialogs for ELIZA scripts beyond its popular “DOCTOR” persona.

This investigation revealed many ELIZAs: in its different program versions, designed to run a wide variety of scripts or personas, built using a series of technical innovations. Inventing ELIZA seeks to correct and to complicate ELIZA’s history and influence by exploring the misconceptions, multiple versions, and missing code of ELIZA. In this excerpt from the book, we examine one of ELIZA's earliest interactions, how it laid the groundwork for human relationships with computers for decades to come, and how the complex program continues to speak to the unrestrained drive of today's AI industry.

They’re always bugging us about something or other.

That dialog has been reprinted countless times and has inspired programmers and writers to dream up many of the chatbots that followed. Yet the closer one inspects that dialog, the more questions arise: Who was this young woman? Was she a real person, or is she the invention of ELIZA creator Joseph Weizenbaum? How exactly did the ELIZA system generate its responses, and how much were they edited? Why did the system work so well to draw people in?

ELIZA, and her “DOCTOR” persona, helped catalyze a mode of thought and an anxiety about people’s relationships with computers. Weizenbaum explored this in his 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason , invoking philosophical, social, and political critiques. The unique machine interaction presented by his program revealed how new forms of human-computer relation would have profound effects that he attempted to explore and to contest. After seeing its public reception, Weizenbaum was startled by the quick and often emotional attachments people would form with ELIZA, which he saw as “clear evidence that people were conversing with the computer as if it were a person who could be appropriately and usefully addressed in intimate terms.” The tendency to attribute empathy and invest private feelings into a computer puzzled Weizenbaum. He was concerned by the extent to which people associated rationality with computation, and ascribed understanding and intelligence to computer systems where none existed.