The Chatbot That Foretold Why People Share Secrets With ChatGPT

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.

Men are all alike.

IN WHAT WAY

They’re always bugging us about something or other.

CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE

Well, my boyfriend made me come here.

YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE

He says I’m depressed much of the time.

I AM SORRY TO HEAR YOU ARE DEPRESSED

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