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ELIZA Chatbot

Joseph Weizenbaum creates ELIZA at MIT — a simple pattern-matching program that simulates a Rogerian therapist. It has no understanding whatsoever. Yet people pour their hearts out to it, forming emotional bonds with a few hundred lines of code. Weizenbaum is horrified. He intended to demonstrate how superficial human-computer interaction is; instead he accidentally proves something profound about human psychology: we're wired to see intelligence and empathy, even where none exists.