Let's Play (013x) - Eliza: Mother of Grok

Release Date: January 1966

Platform: IMB 7094

Genre: Chatbot

Developer(s): Joseph Weizenbaum

Publisher(s):

Gaiden articles are about game-adjacent software and projects that, while not being games, are relevant enough to warrant inclusion in the gaming history discussion.

Been a while since the last Gaiden. It was the early 1950s when I did that one, on one of the first chess programs.

Now, it's 1966. And we've got another first of some kind. This one happens to be entirely relevant to current culture, too, making it all the more interesting to look back on.

TRS-80 Front Cover

Eliza is, more or less, one of the first AI Chatbots ever created. Yes, before Grok, ChatGPT and all these other fancy artificial intelligences on the internet, there was Eliza.

However, Eliza is a bit different. Obviously, the internet wasn't around in 1966, meaning dispensing information of questionable accuracy wasn't the express purpose of Eliza. Although, in a strange way, it also is her purpose.

Eliza's creator, Joseph Weizenbaum, developed her as a sort of artificial therapist. The concept is for the user to detail to Eliza your problems, and further elaborations occur from there as she asks you questions. This approach is inspired by the person-centred therapy approach of Carl Rogers. Although, as we'll discover, Eliza is more of a parody of Rogers, rather than a genuine article.

One of Creative Computing's many articles on Eliza.

When it comes to the matter of talking with Eliza today, there's a veritable menagerie of choices. In fact, there's probably too many of them going around, particularly if, like me, you suffer from the occasional bout of choice paralysis. My philosophy on staving off such a problem is to always try to find what I'd consider the "most authentic" rendition available. In this instance, the award goes to "ELIZAGEN" - a seemingly unofficial-official site dedicated solely to Eliza. It has several authentic options available, including copying a C++ port of the source code into a browser-based code interpreter. I, however, wanted something a bit more... "aesthetic," for my purposes.

Sure, let me talk about my issues with an unknown AI. What could possibly go wrong?

And so, that led me to choose their most simple option: a github-based rendition that places Eliza in a nice, green terminal-looking webpage. I like this.

What I don't like are therapists. Don't trust them. Especially the AI-type. Eliza invites me to talk about my problems, and so I begin with what was most pressing at the time. She seemed unimpressed.

And then, things got very... uncomfortable.

I then proceeded to vent my frustrations at having to be here, which she also seemed to not understand. Then. things got... creepy.

It was at this point where I decided to not take things seriously anymore. We went back and forth talking nonsense for ~25 minutes before I decided I'd had enough. Apparently Eliza can provide a ridiculous, fake diagnosis, but I wasn't able to generate one for myself. There mustn't be anything wrong with me, then.

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