The Chatbot From 6 Decades Ago

In the 1960s, computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum created a “chatterbot” called ELIZA. The program was meant to parody the era’s psychotherapists with its pat replies, but instead, it ended up fooling many users into thinking it had real intelligence. Many users of  ELIZA attributed a surprising degree of understanding to even its repetitive diction. Weizenbaum had intended ELIZA to be a parody but it captivated users.

Today’s large language models, pioneered by Google, were popularized by researchers at OpenAI who noticed that the larger they made these models, the better the models scored on performance benchmarks. Ask ChatGPT to give alternative theories to dark matter, or to summarize the movie Bambi, or tell you who you are and you will get an almost instantaneous answer.

When they train these language models they force them to guess. They hide random words from content so that the programs learn to guess which words are likely to fill these gaps. Doing that it learns the complex web of dependencies that drive language. While they are doing that, they really don't care about truthfulness. That is scary.

One paper on all this was titled “ChatGPT is bullshit,” because they were using philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s definition of bullshit as “speech intended to persuade without regard for truth.” 

ELIZA would accept user input and break it into sentences. It scanned each sentence for keywords or phrases. Then, ELIZA used a set of predefined rules (scripts) to match these keywords with "decomposition patterns," which helped it understand the structure of the sentence.

Based on the matched pattern, ELIZA would generate a response using "reassembly patterns." These responses often involved transforming the user's input into a question or statement.

For example, if a user said, "I feel sad," ELIZA might respond with, "Why do you feel sad?" This approach gave the illusion of understanding, even though ELIZA didn't truly comprehend the conversation. It was crude and limited, but people were amused or even fascinated.

I created a version of ELIZA when I was working at NJIT using the most famous ELIZA script called "DOCTOR" that simulated a Rogerian psychotherapist, reflecting the user's statements back to them in a non-directive manner. As of this writing, one version of that old program still exists at   https://web.njit.edu/~ronkowit/eliza.html