Welcome to the ELIZA Archaeology Project. This research project brings together an interdisciplinary team of scholars, artists, and programmers to explore the history and ideas around the ELIZA chatbot.
ELIZA is the original and highly influential chatbot that launched the genre of human-computer interactions using text-based agents. It was created at MIT in the 1960s as part of Project MAC by it's designer and programmer, Joseph Weizenbaum. ELIZA not only allowed Weizenbaum to develop a mode of interaction with computers that is highly interactive, it also contributed to the way in which people were starting to conceptualize computers as having the capacity to usefully engage in conversation. You can try an accurate reimplementation of ELIZA developed as part of this project.
We plan to contextualize the program, offering its history and context as well as offering a detailed explanation of how the code works. This project will look at the culture of programming in which Weizenbaum was working and then explore his turn from ELIZA/DOCTOR, as he began to warn of the hazards of treating machines like humans. We will look at later works inspired by ELIZA and consider its influences on the way talking computer programs are represented in literature and film.
Since we are a collection of investigators with diverse interests, we have many different voices and, following the example of collaboratively authored analyses, such as Reading Project (Iowa 2015), we aim to collaboratively add to this project website as we work through the materials we are engaged with. We are currently working on a collectively authored book about ELIZA and its influence called Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI.
Our latest thoughts and discoveries about ELIZA are recorded on our project blog.
To read more about the background to this project please see Reading ELIZA: Critical Code Studies in Action.