Well, the ELIZA we all know and love, was just one possible script for ELIZA. With another script, ELIZA could walk you through diagnosing an engine repair. (

Well, the ELIZA we all know and love, was just one possible script for ELIZA. With another script, ELIZA could walk you through diagnosing an engine repair. (Sort of, with silly open-ended questions latching on to keywords you used.) It was, and still is, a substantial advance in natural language processing. Semi-flexible handling of the incredible complexity of natural English. Seems quaint today, but impressive at the time. Giving computers the ability to handle natural language with some kind of flexibility, context-sensitivity, and appearance of understanding (even if they lack it) is one of the core goals of AI. AI was, and still is, a field with decades of serious history and work before anyone heard of Stable Diffusion. And machine learning is just one tiny subset of AI. AI went through a similar hype bubble at the time of ELIZA, funnily enough, with natural language processing! ELIZA and SHRDLU, along with early machine translation systems, gave the impression of far more ability, especially in careful demonstrations, than they actually had. Much hype over machines that could seemingly handle natural language because they can produce coherent sentences sometimes... then disillusionment as the limits of the techniques used were quickly encountered. We may be repeating that today.