| Steward | Lachlan Kermode |
| Editors | Lachlan Kermode |
ELIZA was a computer program developed at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum and released in 1966 that parrotted questions back at a human interlocutor by ranking keywords sourced from their prompts and producing valid sentences by recombining them.
ELIZA threw the underspecified nature of the Turing test into relief as early as a decade after its invention. Many ELIZA users felt a genuine emotional attachment to the program; or rather, to the entity they projected into the program on account of the unexpected therapeutic effect of interacting with it. This apperception was dubbed the ‘ELIZA effect’…
[WIP] thread together ELIZA, psychoanalysis, and the Turing test .