ELIZA: The Accidental Chatbot That Shaped AI History

Table of Links

Abstract and 1. Introduction

2. Why ELIZA?
3. The Intelligence Engineers
4. Newell, Shaw, and Simon’s IPL Logic Theorist: The First True AIs
5. From IPL to SLIP and Lisp
6. A Critical Tangent into Gomoku
7. Interpretation is the Core of Intelligence
8. The Threads Come Together: Interpretation, Language, Lists, Graphs, and Recursion
9. Finally ELIZA: A Platform, Not a Chat Bot!
10. A Perfect Irony: A Lisp ELIZA Escapes and is Misinterpreted by the AI Community
11. Another Wave: A BASIC ELIZA turns the PC Generation on to AI
12. Conclusion: A certain danger lurks there
13. Acknowledgements and References

Abstract

ELIZA, often considered the world’s first chatbot, was written by Joseph Weizenbaum in the early 1960s. Weizenbaum did not intend to invent the chatbot, but rather to build a platform for research into humanmachine conversation and the important cognitive processes of interpretation and misinterpretation. His purpose was obscured by ELIZA’s fame resulting, in large part, from the fortuitous timing of it’s creation and it’s escape into the wild. In this paper I provide a rich historical context for ELIZA’s creation, demonstrating that ELIZA arose from the intersection of some of the central threads in the technical history of AI. I also briefly discuss how ELIZA escaped into the world, and how its accidental escape, along with several coincidental turns of the programming language screws, led both to the misapprehension that ELIZA was intended as a chatbot, and to the loss of the original ELIZA to history for over 50 years.

“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.” (The last line of Turing’s 1950 MIND paper [44])

1 Introduction

ELIZA, often considered the world’s first chatbot, was written by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT in the early 1960s.[47] In building ELIZA, Weizenbaum did not intend to invent the chatbot.[1] Instead, he intended to build a platform for research into human-machine conversation. This may seem obvious – after all, the title of Weizenbaum’s 1966 CACM paper is “ELIZA– A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man And Machine.”, not, for example, “ELIZA - A Computer Program that Engages in Conversation with a Human User”. But Weizenbaum’s purpose for ELIZA was obscured by the circumstances of its creation, and by its own fame resulting, in large part, from the fortuitous timing of it’s creation and it’s escape into the wild.

In this paper I try to provide a rich historical context for ELIZA’s creation. ELIZA arose from the intersection of some of the central threads in the technical history of AI. In addition to explaining how these intersect in Weizenbaum’s creation of ELIZA, I also briefly discuss how ELIZA escaped into the world through no action or intention of Weizenbaum’s, and how its accidental escape, along with a coincidental turn of the programming language screw, led to the misapprehension that ELIZA was intended as a chatbot.

[1] Of course, it would not have been called a “chatbot” at the that time anyway, as that term was not invented until the mid 1990’s[1], but we’ll use that term here as it is the currently appropriate term.