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> ELIZA's (1966) creator, Weizenbaum, intended the program as a method to explore communication between humans and machines. He was surprised, and shocked, that

> ELIZA's (1966) creator, Weizenbaum, intended the program as a method to explore communication between humans and machines. He was surprised, and shocked, that individuals attributed human-like feelings to the computer program, including Weizenbaum's secretary. (citations and further info in the wikipedia article https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA)

dmix 4y ago
> Some of ELIZA's responses were so convincing that Weizenbaum and several others have anecdotes of users becoming emotionally attached to the program, occasionally forgetting that they were conversing with a computer. Weizenbaum's own secretary reportedly asked Weizenbaum to leave the room so that she and ELIZA could have a real conversation. Weizenbaum was surprised by this, later writing: "I had not realized ... that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people." The cliché virtual girlfriend stereotype is a young Japanese 'Herbivore' male but I wouldn't be surprised if women become the biggest consumer of AI chatbots for romantic purposes. Romance novels are a major market and women stereotypically were more inclined to doing the written love letter thing. Although reading the Repilka rants a lot of it was quite male-driven pornographic stuff too.
- jjoonathan 4y ago
  Wasn't Edward Cullen at the top of character.ai for a long time?
- sobrenien 4y ago
  > Although reading the Repilka rants a lot of it was quite male-driven pornographic stuff too. I think it’s important to note here that by far the largest consumers of pornographic erotica are women. So it’s difficult to say what is and isn’t men oriented given that the vast majority of training data is written by and for women.
basch 4y ago
My favorite article, which I post any time I have an excuse to, mentions Eliza. https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7-30a0-9a0a-3ff76e8bfe58 https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7... Eliza Excerpt. The key to why this happened lies in an odd experiment carried out in a computer laboratory in California in 1966. A computer scientist called Joseph Weizenbaum was researching Artificial Intelligence. The idea was that computers could be taught to think - and become like human beings. Here is a picture of Mr Weizenbaum. There were lots of enthusiasts in the Artificial Intelligence world at that time. They dreamt about creating a new kind of techno-human hybrid world - where computers could interact with human beings and respond to their needs and desires. Weizenbaum though was sceptical about this. And in 1966 he built an intelligent computer system that he called ELIZA. It was, he said, a computer psychotherapist who could listen to your feelings and respond - just as a therapist did. But what he did was model ELIZA on a real psychotherapist called Carl Rogers who was famous for simply repeating back the the patient what they had just said. And that is what ELIZA did. You sat in front of a screen and typed in what you were feeling or thinking - and the programme simply repeated what you had written back to you - often in the form of a question. Weizenbaum's aim was to parody the whole idea of AI - by showing the simplification of interaction that was necessary for a machine to "think". But when he started to let people use ELIZA he discovered something very strange that he had not predicted at all. Here is a bit from a documentary where Weizenbaum describes what happened. (video in article) Weizenbaum found his secretary was not unusual. He was stunned - he wrote - to discover that his students and others all became completely engrossed in the programme. They knew exactly how it worked - that really they were just talking to themselves. But they would sit there for hours telling the machine all about their lives and their inner feelings - sometimes revealing incredibly personal details. His response was to get very gloomy about the whole idea of machines and people. Weizenbaum wrote a book in the 1970s that said that the only way you were going to get a world of thinking machines was not by making computers become like humans. Instead you would have to do the opposite - somehow persuade humans to simplify themselves, and become more like machines. But others argued that, in the age of the self, what Weizenbaum had invented was a new kind of mirror for people to explore their inner world. A space where individuals could liberate themselves and explore their feelings without the patronising elitism and fallibility of traditional authority figures. When a journalist asked a computer engineer what he thought about having therapy from a machine. He said in a way it was better because - "after all, the computer doesn't burn out, look down on you, or try to have sex with you" ELIZA became very popular and lots of researchers at MIT had it on their computers. One night a lecturer called Mr Bobrow left ELIZA running. The next morning the vice president of a sales firm who was working with MIT sat down at the computer. He thought he could use it to contact the lecturer at home - and he started to type into it. In reality he was talking to Eliza - but he didn't realise it. This is the conversation that followed. (photograph of conversation) But, of course, ELIZA didn't ring him. The Vice President sat there fuming - and then decided to ring the lecturer himself. And this is the response he got: Vice President - “Why are you being so snotty to me?” Mr Bobrow - “What do you mean I am being snotty to you?” Out of ELIZA and lots of other programmes like it came an idea. That computers could monitor what human beings did and said - and then analyse that data intelligently. If they did this they could respond by predicting what that human being should then do, or what they might want.

dmix 4y ago

> Some of ELIZA's responses were so convincing that Weizenbaum and several others have anecdotes of users becoming emotionally attached to the program, occasionally forgetting that they were conversing with a computer. Weizenbaum's own secretary reportedly asked Weizenbaum to leave the room so that she and ELIZA could have a real conversation. Weizenbaum was surprised by this, later writing: "I had not realized ... that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people." The cliché virtual girlfriend stereotype is a young Japanese 'Herbivore' male but I wouldn't be surprised if women become the biggest consumer of AI chatbots for romantic purposes. Romance novels are a major market and women stereotypically were more inclined to doing the written love letter thing. Although reading the Repilka rants a lot of it was quite male-driven pornographic stuff too.

jjoonathan 4y ago
Wasn't Edward Cullen at the top of character.ai for a long time?
sobrenien 4y ago
> Although reading the Repilka rants a lot of it was quite male-driven pornographic stuff too. I think it’s important to note here that by far the largest consumers of pornographic erotica are women. So it’s difficult to say what is and isn’t men oriented given that the vast majority of training data is written by and for women.

basch 4y ago

My favorite article, which I post any time I have an excuse to, mentions Eliza. https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7-30a0-9a0a-3ff76e8bfe58 https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7... Eliza Excerpt. The key to why this happened lies in an odd experiment carried out in a computer laboratory in California in 1966. A computer scientist called Joseph Weizenbaum was researching Artificial Intelligence. The idea was that computers could be taught to think - and become like human beings. Here is a picture of Mr Weizenbaum. There were lots of enthusiasts in the Artificial Intelligence world at that time. They dreamt about creating a new kind of techno-human hybrid world - where computers could interact with human beings and respond to their needs and desires. Weizenbaum though was sceptical about this. And in 1966 he built an intelligent computer system that he called ELIZA. It was, he said, a computer psychotherapist who could listen to your feelings and respond - just as a therapist did. But what he did was model ELIZA on a real psychotherapist called Carl Rogers who was famous for simply repeating back the the patient what they had just said. And that is what ELIZA did. You sat in front of a screen and typed in what you were feeling or thinking - and the programme simply repeated what you had written back to you - often in the form of a question. Weizenbaum's aim was to parody the whole idea of AI - by showing the simplification of interaction that was necessary for a machine to "think". But when he started to let people use ELIZA he discovered something very strange that he had not predicted at all. Here is a bit from a documentary where Weizenbaum describes what happened. (video in article) Weizenbaum found his secretary was not unusual. He was stunned - he wrote - to discover that his students and others all became completely engrossed in the programme. They knew exactly how it worked - that really they were just talking to themselves. But they would sit there for hours telling the machine all about their lives and their inner feelings - sometimes revealing incredibly personal details. His response was to get very gloomy about the whole idea of machines and people. Weizenbaum wrote a book in the 1970s that said that the only way you were going to get a world of thinking machines was not by making computers become like humans. Instead you would have to do the opposite - somehow persuade humans to simplify themselves, and become more like machines. But others argued that, in the age of the self, what Weizenbaum had invented was a new kind of mirror for people to explore their inner world. A space where individuals could liberate themselves and explore their feelings without the patronising elitism and fallibility of traditional authority figures. When a journalist asked a computer engineer what he thought about having therapy from a machine. He said in a way it was better because - "after all, the computer doesn't burn out, look down on you, or try to have sex with you" ELIZA became very popular and lots of researchers at MIT had it on their computers. One night a lecturer called Mr Bobrow left ELIZA running. The next morning the vice president of a sales firm who was working with MIT sat down at the computer. He thought he could use it to contact the lecturer at home - and he started to type into it. In reality he was talking to Eliza - but he didn't realise it. This is the conversation that followed. (photograph of conversation) But, of course, ELIZA didn't ring him. The Vice President sat there fuming - and then decided to ring the lecturer himself. And this is the response he got: Vice President - “Why are you being so snotty to me?” Mr Bobrow - “What do you mean I am being snotty to you?” Out of ELIZA and lots of other programmes like it came an idea. That computers could monitor what human beings did and said - and then analyse that data intelligently. If they did this they could respond by predicting what that human being should then do, or what they might want.