In 1966, the sociologist and critic Philip Rieff published The Triumph
of the Therapeutic, which diagnosed how thoroughly the culture of
psychotherapy had come to influence ways of life and thought in the
modern West. That same year, in the journal Communications of the
Association for Computing Machinery, the computer scientist Joseph
Weizenbaum published "ELIZA - A Computer Program For the Study of
Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine." Could it be a
coincidence that the program Weizenbaum explained in that paper - the
earliest "chatbot," as we would now call it - is best known for
responding to its user's input in the nonjudgmental manner of a
therapist?

ELIZA was still drawing interest in the nineteen-eighties, as evidenced
by the television clip above. "The computer's replies seem very
understanding," says its narrator, "but this program is merely
triggered by certain phrases to come out with stock responses." Yet
even though its users knew full well that "ELIZA didn't understand a
single word that was being typed into it," that didn't stop some of
their interactions with it from becoming emotionally charged.
Weizenbaum's program thus passes a kind of "Turing test," which was
first proposed by pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing to
determine whether a computer can generate output indistinguishable from
communication with a human being.

In fact, 60 years after Weizenbaum first began developing it, ELIZA -
which you can try online here - seems to be holding its own in that
arena. "In a preprint research paper titled 'Does GPT4 Pass the Turing
Test?,' two researchers from UC San Diego pitted OpenAI's GPT4 AI
language model against human participants, GPT3.5, and ELIZA to see
which could trick participants into thinking it was human with the
greatest success," reports Ars Technica's Benj Edwards. This study
found that "human participants correctly identified other humans in
only 63 percent of the interactions," and that ELIZA, with its tricks
of reflecting users' input back at them, "surpassed the AI model that
powers the free version of ChatGPT."

This isn't to imply that ChatGPT's users might as well go back to
Weizenbaum's simple novelty program. Still, we'd surely do well to
revisit his subsequent thinking on the subject of artificial
intelligence. Later in his career, writes Ben Tarnoff in the Guardian,
Weizenbaum published "articles and books that condemned the worldview
of his colleagues and warned of the dangers posed by their work.
Artificial intelligence, he came to believe, was an 'index of the
insanity of our world.'" Even in 1967, he was arguing that "no computer
could ever fully understand a human being. Then he went one step
further: no human being could ever fully understand another human
being" - a proposition arguably supported by nearly a century and a
half of psychotherapy.

https://www.openculture.com/2024/01/before-chatgpt-there-was-eliza-watch-the-1960s-chatbot-in-action.html
--
[s]
Internetado.
--- If we aren't supposed to eat animals, why are they made with meat ?