People confided in a 1960s chatbot that was only matching patterns.

Wacky WorldAI & Computers

Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA (1966) mostly turned users’ sentences back into questions. Even so, some users became emotionally attached — Weizenbaum wrote that his secretary asked him to leave the room so she could talk to it privately. Treating a program as more understanding than it is became known as the “ELIZA effect”.

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