AI has at many times attempted to create machines which can be described as “thinking machines”. However, a great many of these attempts have produced results which only appear to have worked. All too often people view or hear about the results of one of these machines and equate the ability of these machines to that of true human intelligence. This is known as the Eliza effect: an effect named after Weizenbaum’s therapist program, dubbed Eliza.

What the Eliza program does can be easily misconstrued as human, so it is not too hard to imagine how one might fall victim to the Eliza effect. The program emulates a Rogarian therapist as the user communicates with Eliza by typing text via a terminal.  Eliza seems to respond; often taking the user’s own words and asking the user questions about these words. Here is example text from the Eliza program:

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?

One can see how it is not a too far of a stretch then to let our imaginations get the better of us and believe that the computer empathizes with us and truly understands what we are relaying to it. Even today people can easily fall victim of this trap and feel an emotional tie to a machine that simply does not understand anything at all. A similar example is that of the uncanny valley. “The uncanny valley hypothesis holds that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers.” We may be approaching the uncanny valley (consider computer generated movies and video games characters), but how long until we can interact with machines that truly understand what we are telling them?

Also, to try out an Eliza-like program yourself, visit Yui Chan, the Socratic Zen Conversationalist.