ELIZA
ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program developed from 1964 to 1967[1] at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum.[2][3] Created to explore communication between humans and machines, ELIZA simulated conversation by using a pattern matching and substitution methodology that gave users an illusion of understanding on the part of the program, but had no representation that could be considered really understanding what was being said by either party.[4][5][6] Whereas the ELIZA program itself was written (originally)[7] in MAD-SLIP, the pattern matching directives that contained most of its language capability were provided in separate "scripts", represented in a lisp-like representation.[8] The most famous script, DOCTOR, simulated a psychotherapist of the Rogerian school (in which the therapist often reflects back the patient's words to the patient),[9][10][11] and used rules, dictated in the script, to respond with non-directional questions to user inputs. As such, ELIZA was one of the first chatterbots ("chatbot" modernly) and one of the first programs capable of attempting the Turing test.[12]
For other uses, see ELIZA (disambiguation).ELIZA's creator, Weizenbaum, intended the program as a method to explore communication between humans and machines. He was surprised and shocked that some people, including Weizenbaum's secretary, attributed human-like feelings to the computer program.[3] Many academics believed that the program would be able to positively influence the lives of many people, particularly those with psychological issues, and that it could aid doctors working on such patients' treatment.[3][13] While ELIZA was capable of engaging in discourse, it could not converse with true understanding.[14] However, many early users were convinced of ELIZA's intelligence and understanding, despite Weizenbaum's insistence to the contrary.[6] The original ELIZA source-code had been missing since its creation in the 1960s as it was not common to publish articles that included source code at that time. However, more recently the MAD-SLIP source-code has now been discovered in the MIT archives and published on various platforms, such as archive.org.[15] The source-code is of high historical interest as it demonstrates not only the specificity of programming languages and techniques at that time, but also the beginning of software layering and abstraction as a means of achieving sophisticated software programming.
Response and legacy[edit]
Lay responses to ELIZA were disturbing to Weizenbaum and motivated him to write his book Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, in which he explains the limits of computers, as he wants to make clear his opinion that the anthropomorphic views of computers are just a reduction of human beings or any life form for that matter.[31] In the independent documentary film Plug & Pray (2010) Weizenbaum said that only people who misunderstood ELIZA called it a sensation.[32]
The Israeli poet David Avidan, who was fascinated with future technologies and their relation to art, desired to explore the use of computers for writing literature. He conducted several conversations with an APL implementation of ELIZA and published them – in English, and in his own translation to Hebrew – under the title My Electronic Psychiatrist – Eight Authentic Talks with a Computer. In the foreword, he presented it as a form of constrained writing.[33]
There are many programs based on ELIZA in different programming languages. For MS-DOS computers, some Sound Blaster cards came bundled with Dr. Sbaitso, which functions like the DOCTOR script. Other versions adapted ELIZA around a religious theme, such as ones featuring Jesus (both serious and comedic), and another Apple II variant called I Am Buddha. The 1980 game The Prisoner incorporated ELIZA-style interaction within its gameplay. In 1988, the British artist and friend of Weizenbaum Brian Reffin Smith created two art-oriented ELIZA-style programs written in BASIC, one called "Critic" and the other "Artist", running on two separate Amiga 1000 computers and showed them at the exhibition "Salamandre" in the Musée du Berry, Bourges, France. The visitor was supposed to help them converse by typing in to "Artist" what "Critic" said, and vice versa. The secret was that the two programs were identical. GNU Emacs formerly had a psychoanalyze-pinhead command that simulates a session between ELIZA and Zippy the Pinhead.[34] The Zippyisms were removed due to copyright issues, but the DOCTOR program remains.
ELIZA has been referenced in popular culture and continues to be a source of inspiration for programmers and developers focused on artificial intelligence. It was also featured in a 2012 exhibit at Harvard University titled "Go Ask A.L.I.C.E.", as part of a celebration of mathematician Alan Turing's 100th birthday. The exhibit explores Turing's lifelong fascination with the interaction between humans and computers, pointing to ELIZA as one of the earliest realizations of Turing's ideas.[1]
ELIZA won a 2021 Legacy Peabody Award, and in 2023, it beat OpenAI's GPT-3.5 in a Turing test study.[35]
In popular culture[edit]
In 1969, George Lucas and Walter Murch incorporated an Eliza-like dialogue interface in their screenplay for the feature film THX-1138. Inhabitants of the underground future world of THX, when stressed, would retreat to "confession booths" and initiate a one-sided Eliza-formula conversation with a Jesus-faced computer who claimed to be "OMM".
ELIZA influenced a number of early computer games by demonstrating additional kinds of interface designs. Don Daglow claims he wrote an enhanced version of the program called Ecala on a DEC PDP-10 minicomputer at Pomona College in 1973.
The 2011 video game Deus Ex: Human Revolution and the 2016 sequel Deus Ex: Mankind Divided features an artificial-intelligence Picus TV Network newsreader named Eliza Cassan.[36]
In Adam Curtis's 2016 documentary, HyperNormalisation, ELIZA was referenced in relationship to post-truth.[37]
The twelfth episode of the American sitcom Young Sheldon, aired in January 2018, included the protagonist "conversing" with ELIZA, hoping to resolve a domestic issue.[38]
On August 12, 2019, independent game developer Zachtronics published a visual novel called Eliza, about an AI-based counseling service inspired by ELIZA.[39][40]
In A Murder at the End of the World, the anthropomorphic LLM-powered character Ray cites ELIZA as an example of how some may seek refuge in a non-human therapist.