In Bernand’s Shaw famous 1912 play, Pygmalion, Linguist Henry Higgins tells his friend Colonel Pickering that he could pass off low class flower girl named Eliza Doolittle as a duchess merely by teaching her how to speak properly. The play focused on the impact of proper language use as a form of setting social class relations and has thus it been read and studied for decades by linguists and students alike.
In 1964, at MIT, Joseph Weizenbaum creates ELIZA, the first chatbot, an early natural language processing computer program to explore the communication between humans and machines. and one of the first programs capable of attempting the Turing test
Its (or her) most famous script, DOCTOR, simulated a psychotherapist of the Rogerian school (in which the therapist often reflects back the patient’s words to the patient), and used rules, dictated in the script, to respond with non-directional questions to user inputs.
The following is an example of ELIZA’s output During a consultation with Weizenbaum’s secretary
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
He says I’m depressed much of the time.
I AM SORRY TO HEAR THAT YOU ARE DEPRESSED
It’s true that I am unhappy.
DO YOU THINK COMING HERE WILL HELP YOU NOT TO BE UNHAPPY
I need some help, that much seems certain.
WHAT WOULD IT MEAN IF YOU GOT SOME HELP
Perhaps I could learn to get along with my mother.
TELL ME MORE ABOUT YOUR FAMILY
The program worked in a very simple way, using a few tricks such as matching sentences to pre-stored structures or templates, producing predetermined responses to a few keywords (such as “mother”), and repeating what was input to it back with a few appropriate changes in word order.
To Weizenbaum’s surprise, people became very attached to ELIZA, even if they knew it was only a machine producing the output. Some people, including his secretary, attributed human-like feelings to the computer program, a phenomenon that came to be called the ELIZA effect. Many academics believed that the program would be able to positively influence the lives of many people, particularly those with psychological issues, and that it could aid doctors working on such patients’ treatment. While ELIZA was capable of engaging in discourse, it could not converse with true understanding. However, many early users were convinced of ELIZA’s intelligence and understanding, despite Weizenbaum’s insistence to the contrary.
In one instance, Weizenbaum recalls his secretary consulting regularly with ELIZA and demanding privacy during her “sessions” turning back to him annoyed and saying: do you mind?
There were a number of variants of ELIZA, such as PARRY (Colby, 1975), which “simulated” the output of a paranoid schizophrenic.
