The first Eliza chatbot is recently resurrected by programmers

the first chatbot called Eliza is resurrected by programmers. Some of the specialists consider it the predecessor of AI. However, a living developer only laughs.

Eliza is a simple program created in the 1960s by Joseph Waicebaum, writes Xrust. He was a professor at MTI. He was interested in the integration of man and machine. He developed Eliza. It was a generalized conversation program that allows a person to communicate with a computer. The program could launch scripts with various language rules for representing individual conversational persons.

Vaicentum named this early Eliza processing program in honor of Elisa Spulitl from the play by George Bernard show «Pygmalion», in which the commoner studies is studied Speak English with diction inherent in the highest class, despite its origin from the working class.

Modern systems of a large language model of AI, such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek, are programmed to fill in gaps or answers to questions. Eliza, with her script, Doctor was programmed to encourage the user to continue the conversation.

He wrote the first and most famous script for launching on Eliza, called «Doctor» to simulate the first interview between the patient and the psychotherapist. He reacted to the data entered by the user, choosing keywords and returning them back in a friendly form.

Here is an excerpt of the conversation of his program with the patient:

user: «All men are the same.»
• Eliza: «How»
• User: «They always get us one or another.»
• Eliza: «You can give a specific example»
• User: «Well, my boyfriend made me come here.»
• Eliza “Your boyfriend made you come here”
• user: «He says that I am most of the time in depression.»
• Eliza: «I am sorry for you to hear that you are in Depression ”

Unlike modern chat bots that use large language models and study at huge language databases to generate answers, Eliza, developed three decades before the term» chatbot «appeared, had few data that could be given I would rely.

The Doctor script will look for keywords in the answer of a person and mirror them in his answer. If the keyword is not found, the script will simply offer a common answer.

Eliza was programmed to encourage the user to continue the conversation. This gave the impression that she was a good listener, which is important in psychotherapy, and what made the program a huge sensation.