Lab 1.4: Chattering Chatbots

Chatbots have been around for quite some time now, providing online chat conversations with a software application instead of with a live human person. The first chatbot ever, ELIZA, was developed in 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. ELIZA used pattern matching and scripts to pose as a psychotherapist and provide a simple conversation between humans and machines. 

A second example is PARRY, created in 1972 by psychiatrist Kenneth Colby at Stanford University. PARRY was much more advanced than ELIZA, using a conversational strategy and behaviour model to simulate a patient with paranoid schizophrenia. In the 1970s, PARRY appeared to have passed a version of the Turing test, as trained psychiatrists were only able to distinguish PARRY from actual patients 48% of the time. 

In 1972, at the International Conference on Computer Communications in Washington, ELIZA and PARRY were connected in order to have a conversation with each other. At the time, this demonstration of communication between machines was considered revolutionary. It sparked many discussions on artificial intelligence, ethics and 'Terminator'-like scenarios.

For this project, I wanted to pay tribute to these first chatbots and the scientific implications that they inspired. To do this I recreated that first encounter between chatbots using the modern chatbots EVIEBOT and BOIBOT. This way I aimed to demonstrate how chatbots have evolved over the years and how they can still cause for the same discussions and ideas. The resulting conversation between the chatbots can be seen below.

A conversation with ELIZA