Scientists Resurrect Eliza, the World's First Chatbot Programed as a Psychotherapist Sixty Years Ago

Virtual assistant Alexa has received some competition from ELIZA, the world's first chatbot. ELIZA was recently resurrected from a long-lost computer code, stated Live Science. Researchers are ecstatic with ELIZA's arrival as they believe the chatbot had a significant contribution in making Artificial Intelligence the giant it is today. In 2021, experts uncovered the long-lost code in which ELIZA was programmed and thereafter dedicated years to get the chatbot up and running. Findings regarding ELIZA have been published in the preprint database arXiv.

ELIZA was created in the 1960s by MIT professor, Joseph Weizenbaum. The chatbot was named after Eliza Doolittle, a character from the play Pygmalion. Weizenbaum himself invented ELIZA's programming language, Michigan Algorithm Decoder Symmetric List Processor (MAD-SLIP). The pace of innovation was so fast back then that MAD-SLIP was soon copied into the language Lisp. The early internet experienced swift popularity, with the Lisp version of MAD-SLIP going viral. This caused MAD-SLIP to disappear slowly and the original ELIZA to become obsolete.

Jeff Shrager, a cognitive scientist at Stanford University, and Myles Crowley, an MIT archivist, found the original ELIZA code hidden in Weizenbaum's papers. As soon as they realized what the code was, the duo became interested in getting the original ELIZA back. "I have a particular interest in how early AI pioneers thought," Shrager explained. "Having computer scientists' code is as close to having a record of their thoughts, and as ELIZA was — and remains, for better or for worse — a touchstone of early AI, I want to know what was in his mind." 

The pursuit was not easy by any means. The duo did not even know whether the code worked. Their first step was to clean the code and then debug them. They found a bug in the code but chose not to fix it, to maintain its originality.  "It would ruin the authenticity of the artifact," Shrager explained, "like fixing a mis-stroke in the original Mona Lisa." The team found that if a particular number was entered, the program would crash.  After this, they created an emulator to adjudge what kind of computer would be needed to run ELIZA. The team arranged for such a computer and on December 21, 2024, had the original ELIZA up and running for the first time in six decades. "By making it run, we demonstrated that this was, in fact, a part of the actual ELIZA lineage and that it not only worked but worked extremely well," Shrager said.

The original ELIZA was programmed to respond as a psychotherapist. In the six decades since its invention, AI has grown by leaps and bounds. Therefore, ELIZA seems to be primitive in comparison to modern alternatives like ChatGPT. "ELIZA is really remarkable when you consider that it was written in 1965," David Berry, a digital humanities professor at the University of Sussex in the U.K. and co-author of the paper said. "It can hold its own in a conversation for a while." One thing though, in which ELIZA seems to have been better than ChatGPT was listening, according to Berry. Modern LLMs attempt to complete the user's sentence, while ELIZA was programmed to continue a conversation, experts claim. 

Researchers believe it is very important to restore technological artifacts like ELIZA.  "We need to work harder as a society to keep these traces of the nascent age of computation alive," Berry said, "because if we don't then we will have lost the digital equivalents of the Mona Lisa, Michelangelo's David or the Acropolis."