Why Everyone Else Believes
In the mid-1960s, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Joseph Weizenbaum, built an automated psychotherapist he called Eliza. This chatbot was simple. Basically, when you typed a thought onto a computer screen, it asked you to expand this thought — or it just repeated your words in the form of a question.
Even when Dr. Weizenbaum cherry-picked a conversation for the academic paper he published on the technology, it looked like this, with Eliza responding in capital letters:
Men are all alike.
IN WHAT WAY?
They’re always bugging us about something or other.
CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE?
Well, my boyfriend made me come here.
YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE
But much to Dr. Weizenbaum’s surprise, people treated Eliza as if it were human. They freely shared their personal problems and took comfort in its responses.
“I knew from long experience