A mechanism or tactic · 1966 · First chatbots
ELIZA
A short pattern-matching script that reflects the user's words back with questions attached. Most people told it they understood, within minutes.
The founding demonstration that an attentive-seeming system is enough, and that the belief is generated by the response rather than by the intelligence behind it. Every companion app since is a bigger ELIZA, and the field has still not fully absorbed what that first one proved.
Application. One-sided attachment put to work on purpose. Creator economies, community, fandom as infrastructure, and the things that genuinely help people. Not automatically good - a tool with an obvious use is a tool that will also get a bad one.
Consideration. The part where somebody stops and thinks. The research, the diagnosis, the ethics, the lawsuits, the regulators. Roughly fifty years of arguing with itself about whether this is a relationship.
Where it sits
1950 1950-1999 · 1966 1999
Provenance · 1 source record(s)
- retrievableThe original report of the program, and the source of the finding the entry turns on: that people told it they understood within minutes. This paper describes the pattern-matching method. It is NOT the source of the moral argument, which came ten years later in the book Computer Power and Human Reason (W. H. Freeman, 1976) - a distinction the bare citation string 'Weizenbaum, 1966' did not make.Weizenbaum, J. (1966). ELIZA - A computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine. Communications of the ACM, 9(1), 36-45. ↗
COMPANION The companion chatbot
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