Faculty of Art

Drawing and Painting

Fiona Enright

ELIZA

"The fame and popularity attained by the chatterbot celebrity ELIZA testify to this phenomenon. One of the first chatterbot programs in history, ELIZA was developed by MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum between 1964 and 1966 (Weizenbaum 1966). The principle guiding ELIZA's responses to an interrogator's input is as simple as it is sly: simulating a Rogerian psychotherapist, her primary purpose is to listen. So instead of contributing any content of her own to the conversation, she supportively rephrases what we have just told her and encourages us to continue talking. As long as we are content to play by these rules, ELIZA may come across as rather convincing in her role. However, if we start pushing her limits, trying to make her reveal parts of her view on the world, it soon becomes obvious that she is really nothing more than a mechanical, empty conversational machine, in possession of no external world of her own."Tronstad, R. (2014). Chatterbots. In M. Ryan, L. Emerson, & B. J. Robertson, The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media. Johns Hopkins University Press. Credo Reference: http://ocadu.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/jhupjohns/chatterbots/0?institutionId=4079