Listening to that demo, it's incredible how far we've come! Or, not. Racter was commercially released for Mac in December 1985: Racter strings together words

Listening to that demo, it's incredible how far we've come! Or, not. Racter was commercially released for Mac in December 1985: Racter strings together words according to "syntax directives", and the illusion of coherence is increased by repeated re-use of text variables. This gives the appearance that Racter can actually have a conversation with the user that makes some sense, unlike Eliza, which just spits back what you type at it. Of course, such a program has not been written to perfection yet, but Racter comes somewhat close. Since some of the syntactical mistakes that Racter tends to make cannot be avoided, the decision was made to market the game in a humorous vein, which the marketing department at Mindscape dubbed "tongue-in-chip software" and "artificial insanity". https://www.mobygames.com/game/macintosh/racter https://www.mobygames.com/game/macintosh/racter https://www.myabandonware.com/game/racter-4m/play-4m https://www.myabandonware.com/game/racter-4m/play-4m It's only amazing that chatGPT backed by GPT-3 is the first thing since then to do enough better that everyone is engaged. I owned that in 1985, and having studied AI/ML previously I've been (and remain something of) an AGI skeptic. But now in 2022, I finally think “this changes everything” ... not because it's AI, but because it's making the application of matching probabilistic patterns across mass knowledge practical and useful for everyday work, particularly as a structured synthesis assistant.