I interviewed Jeff Shrager. He is one of the people behind this site and the effort to investigate Eliza.

They do a lot of interesting work and the history of Eliza is more complicated than you would guess.

(The interview was before chatGPT was a big thing.)If you don't mind the plug:

https://corecursive.com/eliza-with-jeff-shrager/

It's amazing to me that the "chat bot" interface for ELIZA, developed in the mid 1960s really isn't very different from that of ChatGPT 4, 60 years later.

I recommend also “computer power and human reason”, his 1976 treatise. it really presages all of the last few years of AIspew.

To Weizenbaum's point, back in the 80s I used to cart a Teletype and an acoustic coupler to high schools to talk about computer science. The big demo was Eliza. Even after I explained that it was a simplistic program (getting it to say “Perhaps we fragisticulate each other in your dreams”), and showed the students the scripts it was using, I found students would want to have serious conversations with it, of the “please don't look at it just now” variety. Seeing that the students and teachers consistently missed the point, I stopped using it.