Lessons from the very first chatbot

0:02Hello and welcome to The Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of If Then Statements. I'm your friend David Pierce and today on the show we're talking about chatbots. Specifically the very first chatbot from the 1960s. It was called Eliza and the way to think about it is basically as a very simple back and forth experience that you might have with a computer. One of the first instantiations of Eliza was this thing called doctor which would play therapist for you. And it would ask you how you were doing and you would respond and you'd say, I'm having a bad day. And it would go through and look for specific keywords and ways that you responded and respond back to you.

0:36And it was able to carry on a pretty functional conversation. It remembered things about you. It could ask questions. It could move things along. It could make connections. It wasn't very sophisticated, just a few hundred lines of code, but it worked. It was so effective that it convinced a lot of people that there had to be a human on the other end. It was a fascinating product made by some fascinating people, and a group of academics and researchers and writers recently has excavated all of the source code of ELIZA, and they've written a book called Inventing ELIZA about where it came from, who created it, and the lessons it might have for us in the current world of AI.

1:14Because, spoiler alert, there are a lot of them. And the way that we think about computers really hasn't changed that much since the 1960s. It's going to be very fun. I'm really excited to dig into it. But first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today. This is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, August 11th, 2026. Have you ever wondered why your Amazon emails are so unhelpful? They just say, like, your wireless accessory is confirmed, instead of giving you anything useful or specific? Well, The Verge's Miyasato wondered too, and she found out that it's all about AI data. Basically, if Amazon puts your orders in the email, suddenly Gmail knows what you're buying, which means Gemini can do a better job of steering you to stuff you like on Google Shopping.

1:54Amazon says it's also about privacy and convenience, but this is a company that is also fighting perplexity and others to keep AI agents from taking over any of your shopping experience. Because it's very important to Amazon that you go to Amazon.com and accidentally click on a bunch of barely labeled ads. That's the business. Meanwhile, David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount, has reportedly decided to move his company out of California if the state's attorney general refuses to settle the antitrust case challenging Paramount's acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery. This is all obviously a threat.

2:26The case isn't set to go to court until next March, and Paramount will start owing shareholders about$7 million a day this October. Ellison would very much like to not spend that money. But if you're wondering how serious this plan actually is, Paramount reportedly hasn't even decided where its new headquarters would be, and it would be scheduled to move there in like six weeks. I'm not sure this is a real plan. At least not yet. Finally, we're only a day away from Google's next big launch event where we're expecting new Pixel phones, including maybe new foldable, a new Pixel Watcher 2, and maybe even an AirTag-style Pixel tracker.

2:59There's a big event tomorrow night hosted by Trevor Noah, but if it's anything like Jimmy Fallon's weird informer show last year, you can safely skip that one. You can read more about all this at TheVerge.com. That is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, August 11th. Are you a pet owner? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill over$1 ,000. Always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance for dogs and cats. According to consumeradvocate.org, you get paid back up to 90 % of vet bills at any vet in the U.S. and Canada, with claims paid back in as little as two days.

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3:53Hey, it's Sue Bird. This week on Bird's Eye View, I'm joined by Kayla McBride. We get into her unstoppable three-point game and what getting Nafisa Collier back means for the Lynx playoff run. Plus, I take a look at why Kelsey Plum landed in Phoenix at the trade deadline. Check out Bird's Eye View on YouTube and your favorite podcast app. All right, let's talk chatbots. I am joined now by two of the co-authors of Inventing Eliza. David Berry, professor at the University of Sussex. Welcome to the show. Thank you. And Mark Marino, professor at the University of Southern California. Welcome to the show.

4:25Hello. Thanks for having us. You're the American one. David's the British one. If you're listening, that's a useful way to remember who's who on this one. Yeah, otherwise we're indistinguishable. That's right. You would never be able to tell the two of you apart, except for the accents. So it's good that we have those. I want to go back to the beginning here, and I want to talk about Joseph Weisenbaum a little bit, because I think a lot of the study that you guys have done is of Joseph Weisenbaum and his own feelings about the thing that he created. So give me just a flavor, David, of who Joseph Weizenbaum was.

4:58So Joseph Weizenbaum is quite an incredible character. I think that's fair to say. I mean, he was born in 1923 in Nazi Germany. He was Jewish, born to a kind of upper middle class family, actually. And of course, they start to suffer under the rise of the Nazis. and so his family emigrated to the US in 1936 he was 13 years old so that early on he was already living quite an incredible life he moves to Detroit and becomes Americanized though he never fully loses his German accent goes to Wayne University now Wayne State University I believe and there he studies mathematics because he doesn't feel his english language is strong enough for any other subject and he was a natural at mathematics and of course mathematics in the 1940s coming into the 1950s is really seething with the excitement over digital computation we've got a lot of interesting experiments taking place and wayne state is actually where one of the first digital computers is being made but being made by hand and weisenbaum is actually part of the team who are actually soldering together and trying to figure out how to to make this object and so he's very much um right there at the very beginning of the kind of turn to the digital he's living the things that we can only read about now and the excitement of that time but also he's a very fascinating character he's not a usual um technical person he's got a very well-rounded personality, which I think probably comes out of that German-Berlin sensibility, where culture is so important to one's life.

6:45Consequently, he has an interest in everything, and he's particularly fascinated by the American notion of the con. A wonderful book called The Con Documents is, for a Brit, actually quite a strange part of American culture, which is that There were entire societies set up just to con people who would build semi-film sets. This was in the early part of the 20th century, so 1910s, 1920s, where they would literally pull people in just to fleece them of their cash. And it was really quite a remarkable thing. And this book, The Con, documents it. And Weissberg was absolutely obsessed with this book.

7:24So this was the idea that one could build an artifice and the artifice behind it would hide all of the work that was being done to make this artifice work. It's very kind of dramatic, like a theatre, really. A theatre made to steal money from people. And so when he's working at Wayne State, he starts thinking about these questions and he goes to work. he works for General Electric who at the time had been tasked with producing a new computer system really to save the banking system in America because of the use of paper checks I don't know if your readers and watchers will ever remember those but essentially that's how we used to pay money between organizations and people and the quantity of checks was so huge that they couldn't be managed by human tellers anymore so they needed to computerize the system and Vitamount was very much part of that computerization process.

8:21And he almost certainly would have witnessed the very famous situation where General Electric were asked to give a demo to the Bank of America. The system didn't work. And so they had to do a con, which is that they set up a facade of the computer system. And in the back room, where the system wasn't finished yet or had too many bugs, people would literally fill in the bits to make it kind of work. the Wizard of Oz demo, right? This is the man behind the curtain in a very real way. Yeah. Essentially, Bank of America didn't get wind of it at all. And they gave the contract to General Electric and the rest is history.

8:57Eventually, luckily, I suppose, that system worked and was a great demonstrator of the power of digital systems. And from that, really, that I think inspired Weizenbaum to think about the difference between what we would now call the interface or the surface of computation and what's going on behind. They don't have to be the same thing. And so he starts to already early on start thinking about, you know, what does it mean to present something to a user? And he writes a very famous paper called How to Make a Computer Appear Intelligent in 1962. And he says, you know, it doesn't matter if the system behind isn't intelligent.

9:38What matters is that people think it is. And you can see already the bits of Eliza falling into place for him to go on to do it. Mark, this is an interesting moment in time that you guys reckon with a bunch in the book is kind of this question of what was Joseph Weizenbaum building when he built Eliza. And there is a sense that he made a therapist, which you prove pretty conclusively is not true, right? That's the demo everybody remembers where you're talking into a therapist. That was not the original or only conception of Eliza, that it's actually a collection of chatbots. But it also doesn't seem like he was building what he perceived to be some kind of breakthrough user product that someday somebody would sell and make lots of money on, that there was something more philosophically questioning about this thing that he was building.

10:29What do you think he was building when he was building Eliza in those early days? I mean, that's a great question, David. I think it's complex. So Jeff Schrager, one of our collaborators, he's fond of just pointing to the title of that initial paper in 1966, ELISA, A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine. So there's one version of this where he's doing an experiment to see what happens when people interact with a computer. I don't think it's as simple as that, I guess. And this is maybe this is why it's wonderful to have eight contributors to a book all in dialogue over the course of four years.

11:07Yeah. Because on the one hand, you know, again, Peggy Weil, another one of our contributors, loves to quote the first line of that article, which is, it is said that to explain is to explain away. So in other words, here's my clever little chatbot. Now I'm going to explain it to you. It's like one of those Penn & Teller's, you know, magic tricks, right? They do the magic trick. Then they show you how they do the magic trick. Right. And then that's also a bit of a performance. I think where things get really complicated for me is, and then he includes this dialogue called Men Are All Alike, or that's how we refer to it, right?

11:42And it seems to be between a young woman and this doctor script. It's so convincing. It's so interesting. And it ends in this mic drop moment, right? Where the therapist seems to draw back around the conversation about the father and the conversation about the boyfriend. And it's imagine, you know, at this time where, you know, psychotherapy is popular in the consciousness of America, right? And so also some of our efforts were in trying to figure out how he was the only person who could have, Weisenbaum himself could have known that that conversation, if you said it in a certain way, could have led to that particular moment.

12:23But I guess the reason why I'm calling our attention to that dialogue is that that dialogue to me says that he was also invested in Eliza and Dr. Seeming like it really did what, you know, it could converse, right? And he continues to tell the story about his secretary closing the door, you know, and having a private conversation with it. And so it's like these dueling impulses. On the one hand, I'm going to explain everything to you. On the other hand, I'm going to do the magic trick. And it is a good magic trick. Actually, this might be a useful thought exercise. I think a lot of people watching and listening to this will have had lots of experiences with chatbots.

13:05In the 1960s, just put me in the frame of mind of somebody sitting down in front of Eliza. So to give you an idea of what computation was like, because already the computers were becoming commoditized, right? So DEC had produced the PDP-1. and in fact um mit received one of the first pdp ones as a gift uh from deck and so already people were moving away from the idea that computers were hand soldered together they would purchase them sort of pre-made as it were but the pdp one when it was delivered had no operating system right the first thing you would have to do is write your own operating system to use this computer and then you'd have to write all your tools and then you might be able to have enough time to write some actual software that did something that was quite interesting so it was quite an uphill battle to get these machines working secondly i would say that um they were fairly primitive um so the idea of a screen in of itself um was a really new idea and and in fact most of the interface experience that most people would have would be with a tele typewriter um so it was on paper with this clattering, incredibly loud device that you would type your request into the computer.

14:21It would clatter away and then give you an answer on paper. So it was very clunky, very slow, very loud, very large, actually, and quite hot because these machines were obviously burning a lot of electricity. But what I would say to you is there was also a kind of imaginary there as well. I mean, Vannevar Bush's Memex, Linklider, and lots of other people were already trying to think beyond the existing restrictions of the hardware of the time and dreaming of new ways of seeing what human-machine interaction could be. And I think that Eliza certainly was part of that because it was part of the project Mac project at MIT, which was explicitly about how can we use computers in a different way?

15:14I always like to muse on this question, how could people have thought that this chatbot was a person? It's so rudimentary, although of course, as we've already mentioned, so clever. I think what David just described of not having experience of anything happening between you and a computer, perhaps for a lot of these people. And then least of all, instead of having a screen interfacing something just by, you know, we're a lot closer to the Turing test imitation game, passing notes with someone who's behind a curtain than we are anything like we're experiencing right now. So if you get, if text goes in and text comes out, You know, I mean, I hate to hearken us back to like a telegram, but I mean, communication is happening pretty much the same way it could happen with another human.

16:07And you had no experience of communicating with another human through a computer at all anyway. Right. Well, OK, this is actually the reason I bring this up is because one of the things I have been trying to reckon with for a long time and was thinking about this a lot reading your book is overwhelmingly people who sit down and experience this very simple, very basic chatbot, Eliza, fall for it. They believe in the thing. There are lots of people who cannot be convinced that there is not a person on the other end. The experience works. Like you said, Mark, the magic trick is successful. and I've been trying to decide is there something about that that is fundamentally about inexperience with computers and if you just gave that to a bunch of people who had used this kind of technology before if it would have been less new and less surprising and less magical or if there is something deeply human inside of us that just desperately wants that magic trick to work and my sense is it's probably a little bit of both but I know you've both spent a lot of time thinking about this David, where do you land on this?

17:11So, you know, this is a fundamental question. I would take you back to the early part of the 20th century. When you read the cons that were taking place, you know, you read them with a sense of kind of disbelief that people were taken in. It seems utterly, to me anyway, that American, rich Americans would visit this fake bank and would be wowed by the fake technology that they were showing and the fake tellers and the fake stock exchange and then would hand over hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions today. And then when the con people ran away with the money, which is what they did, they ran, got to the train station and they'd be gone, the people would pull back the screens and it would be paper mache, balsa wood and why would they believe it?

18:03I think, as you said, there seems to be a deep kind of desire for us to want to believe. And maybe we believe because it seems like such a good offer. And Eliza seems like such a good offer, right? You had a therapy time, which was free. I mean, that's a good starting point. And it listened without putting you down or attacking you. It was a very nice experience. And it's also novel, right? kind of interesting to chat to a computer and and so on so forth so i think many of things play together in the same way that today you you hear about people having ai uh boyfriends and girlfriends and you kind of probably can't believe and there's a wonderful interview in the new york times actually with somebody who had an ai boyfriend and they said you do realize it's a machine she's like yeah yeah but that's what makes it so good i can turn it off when i have enough so that we're able to do, and this is the theater, isn't it?

19:02We walk into a theater. We know the theater is a theater. We know they're actors, and yet we can allow ourselves to just become and listen to and experience the play. I mean, I threw two more things into that bucket. One is, it's asking you how you're doing, right? Which is a very disarming question and puts us maybe in a bit of a vulnerable state, especially if we need to express that as probably most humans need to do, right? So that's step number one. And I think we see that in a lot of chatbots. The second, and of course, the design of it is brilliant that it keeps asking questions. Of course, the, you know, ChatGPT and all those other frontier models have figured out that trick.

19:40They end every sentence in a question. Again, drawing from the expertise of our members, Jeff Schrager is quick to talk about the kind of repair we do conversationally, even to have a conversation with another human. And then maybe a good example might be when you receive text messages from someone who's using speech to text and they're kind of terrible, right? But then you do all this repair work to put it together. The reckoning with all of this strikes me as the thing that then Joe Weizenbaum goes and does, right? Like he has this real, I think I get the sense he was surprised by how well Eliza worked that he's like, I built this thing that seems like an interesting way to communicate with computers.

20:24And then he's like, oh my God, people are pouring their heart and soul into this thing thinking that the computer is a person. And he seems to, rather than do what it seems like everyone else did at the time and what certainly everybody's doing right now, which is say, you know, oh my God, I just got rich. This is going to be incredible and technology is going to take over. There's Scourge McDucking rubbing their hands together. He has a real crisis of faith in all of this. And before we skip to now, I want to get to kind of where Joseph Weizenbaum got to at the end of all of this process, at the end of all of this thinking.

20:58He seems to have a real kind of, you know, Oppenheimer, what have I done kind of moment at the end of all of this. David, where does he net out after seeing what Eliza accomplishes and does to people? So I think that's quite a complicated question, actually, because it's not a single moment of conversion. Remembering his kind of experience with the Khan and the reveal of the Khan, he loved this idea of doing the reveal. And he used to play with his children. He would write little programs for them, and then he would reveal that it was actually him that was the Wizard of Oz that was making the system work.

21:38And I think firstly what worried him was when he did the reveal, you know uh people like yes joe could you leave the room well stop stop ruining the experience so that that's the first thing that's kind of interesting the second thing is is that people don't want to have the magic revealed to them i think this becomes a theme that i want to i want to stay on here but yeah but i but i think that's right people even if he says look it's a trick i did it everybody says no no no go away it's more fun to leave in the trick right yeah the worst cut the worst kind of person is you're in the the theater watching a play and they're like you know this is a play this isn't real i'm like thanks but um so that was the first thing that that that question but i think the second thing was was that he began to notice that people in mit were talking about humans as if humans were sort of robots or disposable and this really concerned him because, of course, it reminded him of the language of Nazi Germany and the language of how the Jews were described by the Nazis as non-human, not important.

22:47And Minsky talked about humans as meat machines. And he thought this was utterly unacceptable, actually. And this is a time, of course, with the rising political crises in America. You've got the civil rights movement. You've also got the Vietnam War. You've got the use of particular kinds of rational management in government to run the Vietnam War with little understanding of human context and human nuance. And all of this surrounds him together with Hannah Arendt's work that he was a big fan of and deeply read her work. And also, of course, Mumford, Lewis Mumford, another very important influence on him.

23:33And the context of the time is so important. There was this concern about what was happening in America. What is happening to us? Where are we going wrong? And so I think all this adds up to a kind of a tipping point, really, where he says to himself, I'm actually not equipped to deal with where I am, this place at MIT. I'd wanted to get here, the pinnacle of my career. and yet now I'm here, I'm seriously doubting my place. And so very strangely, particularly for a computer scientist, he applies to do a kind of humanities fellowship, actually, where he goes off and studies humanities texts, a whole range of texts, philosophical, sociological, and political, and eventually tries to put this all together into a book called Computer Power and Human Reason, which is, of course, that really is the turning point in 1976, which says computing, and particularly artificial intelligence, is going wrong.

24:43There is something very wrong with the way we are approaching this topic. And I will just add that made him a lot of enemies, both at MIT and across the field. He became a heretic. Support for the show comes from Superhuman. It's summer, which means a lot of us have vacations planned. But there's one part of going on vacation that's not all that fun. Coming back to work. Your inbox is full, tasks have piled up, and it feels impossible to stay on top of everything. Superhuman Go is an AI chat that's always there when you need it, already aware of what you're doing and doesn't ask you to start from zero.

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28:49I wrote down a line from your book that he drew a distinction between calculating and understanding. And there's a real thread in all of this that I had not really thought of in this way, but is the sort of turning idea that humans are complicated and irrational and messy and impossible to understand. And by comparison, computers and math are perfect and rational and thus better. And I think we are in a very real way living in that moment right now where there is a belief that computers are better than humans, that they are more predictable, that they are more understandable, and that those are good things and we should thus trust them more than we trust humans.