ELIZA effect
tendency to assume computer behaviors are analogous to human behaviors
In computer science, the ELIZA effect is a tendency to project human traits—such as experience, semantic comprehension or empathy—onto rudimentary computer programs. ELIZA was a symbolic AI chatbot developed in 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum that imitated a psychotherapist. Many early users were supposedly convinced of ELIZA's intelligence and understanding, despite its basic text-processing approach and the explanations of its limitations.
History
The effect is named for ELIZA, the 1966 chatbot developed by MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum. When executing Weizenbaum's DOCTOR script, ELIZA simulated a Rogerian psychotherapist, largely by rephrasing the "patient"'s replies as questions:
Human: Well, my boyfriend made me come here.ELIZA: Your boyfriend made you come here?Human: He says I'm depressed much of the time.ELIZA: I am sorry to hear you are depressed.Human: It's true. I'm unhappy.ELIZA: Do you think coming here will help you not to be unhappy?
Though designed strictly as a mechanism to support "natural language conversation" with a computer, ELIZA's DOCTOR script was found to be surprisingly successful in eliciting emotional responses from users who, in the course of interacting with the program, began to ascribe understanding and motivation to the program's output. As Weizenbaum later wrote, "I had not realized ... that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people." Indeed, ELIZA's code had not been designed to evoke this reaction in the first place. Upon observation, researchers discovered users unconsciously assuming ELIZA's questions implied interest and emotional involvement in the topics discussed, even when they consciously knew that ELIZA did not simulate emotion.
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This entry incorporates text from “ELIZA effect” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.