Original ELIZA Source code, Joseph Weizenbaum, 1965, Prof. Weizenbaum’s archives at MIT [CC-Zero].
Men are all alike.
IN WHAT WAY
They’re always bugging use about something or other.
CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE
Well, my boyfriend made me come here.
YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE
He says I’m depressed much of the time.
I AM SORRY TO HEAR YOU ARE DEPRESSED
A typical conversation with ELIZA, excerpt from Joseph Weizenbaum’s paper “ELIZA – computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine” (in Communications of the ACM, vol. 9. 1, jan. 1966, 36–45, DOI : 10.1145 / 365153.365168).
ABOUT CODE
ELIZA is a computer programme developed by Joseph Weizenbaum, at MIT in the mid 1960s. Long before ChatGPT, ELIZA was the world’s first chatbot; the first program to enable people to hold a conversation with a computer.
ELIZA was the system for running multiple scripts. The most famous script, indeed the only one ever published, was called DOCTOR. That script caused ELIZA to emulate a Rogerian psychotherapist, asking questions that encouraged its human interlocutor to carry the conversation forward. Other personas included SPACKS, which discussed a poem; SYNCTA, which discussed time synchronization; and NEWENG, which discussed states in New England.
In 2021 this original and complete version of the ELIZA code was recovered from the MIT archives by a team of researchers from Europe and the United States. It shows programming ideas in the system that put it ahead of its time. For example, ELIZA has a built-in mechanism to edit scripts. In this version, the CHANGE function would prompt the statement “PLEASE INSTRUCT ME” and allow the user to edit scripts while they were running. Such a feature prefigures the way modern large language models learn from the interactions with the user to better adapt to their needs.
This relatively simple program, composed of 411 lines of computer code written in MAD-SLIP, has had a remarkable impact on computer science, and more widely in culture, and continues to inspire and shape our vision of computers, whether in works of fiction, like the character HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey (film directed by Stanley Kubrick in 1968), or in our daily interactions with Siri and ChatGPT.
BIOGRAPHY
TEAM ELIZA is a group of scholars, programmers, artists and combinations of those three titles who are working on the exploration and exegesis of the ELIZA source code. Our team includes David M. Berry, Sarah Ciston, Anthony C. Hay, Mark C. Marino, Peter Millican, Arthur I. Schwarz, Jeff Shrager, and Peggy Weil. The team are the co-authors of a forthcoming book from MIT Press: Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI (2026).
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