#Joseph Weizenbaum

The deeper story behind the world's first chatbot — what ELIZA revealed about human psychology, the nature of language, and the gap between the appearance of understanding and its reality. We go beyond the famous chatbot story to the philosophical questions it raised, and why those questions matter more than ever in the age of large language models.

He built the world's first chatbot as a demonstration of how shallow conversation could be — and watched in horror as people fell in love with it. The story of Joseph Weizenbaum: the man who understood, earlier and more clearly than almost anyone, what was dangerous about our relationship with intelligent machines, and who spent the rest of his life trying to make the world hear the warning.

In 1966 a simple pattern-matching program became the world's first chatbot — and people fell in love with it, told it their secrets, and begged not to have it turned off. Its creator was horrified. The story of ELIZA, the DOCTOR persona, and what a program that understood nothing revealed about the human need to be heard.