1966Peer-reviewedWell documented
ELIZA, the First Chatbot
On the timeline · around 1966 ·
What happened
Joseph Weizenbaum of MIT wrote ELIZA, a program that imitated a psychotherapist by matching patterns in a user's typed words and reflecting them back as questions — all in about 200 lines of code. Weizenbaum was disturbed to find that users formed real emotional attachments to it.
Why it matters
ELIZA was the first program widely seen as conversing in natural language, and the reaction it provoked foreshadowed how readily people would attribute understanding to machines.