ELIZA
loreprogrammingops culture
Joseph Weizenbaum's 1966 chatbot whose users confided in a pattern-matching script, naming the ELIZA effect.
ELIZA's DOCTOR script parodied a Rogerian therapist by reflecting the user's words back as questions, and Weizenbaum was disturbed to find people, including his own secretary, treating it as a confidant. The ELIZA effect, our readiness to attribute understanding to systems that merely manipulate symbols, is named for it. Every generation of conversational software since has re-run the experiment at larger scale.
Also known as: the ELIZA effect, DOCTOR