The Eliza Effect
A 1966 program that just rephrased your words convinced people it understood them. So does ChatGPT.
Grounded in the research on the ELIZA effect
1966: a fake therapist
Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer scientist at MIT, builds ELIZA between 1964 and 1966 on an IBM 7094. Its famous script, DOCTOR, fakes a Rogerian psychotherapist. The trick is lazy: scan your sentence for keywords, bounce it back as a question. Say 'I feel sad' and it replies 'Why do you feel sad?' No understanding, no memory of you. Just clever string-swapping dressed up as a listening ear.
Named after Eliza Doolittle
Weizenbaum names it after Eliza Doolittle from Shaw's Pygmalion, the flower girl drilled to fake a posh accent. The nod is honest: ELIZA only mimics the surface of speech with nothing real behind it. He picks the therapist framing on purpose. A Rogerian shrink can answer almost anything by reflecting it back, so the program needs zero knowledge of the actual world to seem fluent.