Chatbot

Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA imitated a psychotherapist by turning the user's sentences into questions, in a few hundred lines of code and with no claim to understanding. Weizenbaum grew troubled by how many people attributed insight to it anyway — a phenomenon that now carries his name, the ELIZA effect.

The middle period consisted of rule-based customer service bots built on decision trees, frequently maddening. Language models changed the terms entirely: the conversation is no longer scripted, but the model will in return assert things with complete confidence that are not true.