Re: Just take me out back and shoot me...
"Syed Zaeem Hosain (as Syed dot Hosain at aeris dot net)" <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.lisp.lispworks.general |
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| Message-ID | <SA9PR18MB37745AFF5503E9C6C430DAFAF02FA@SA9PR18MB3774.namprd18.prod.outlook.com> |
Ummm ... I would not have labelled Eliza a "prank" per se!
It was (still available online!) a simple-minded processor of "natural language" to respond to text from a user ... often just feeding back variations of the text entered by the user in later questions. Conversational like a psychologist!
I had the privilege of taking my very first CS class from Prof. Joe Weizenbaum (developer of Eliza) in 1974 at MIT. He explained his motivation for writing it as an exercise: to develop Eliza to process "natural language" in a human-like way.
What he found interesting was that, over time, people became comfortablewith interacting with Eliza. Indeed, one observation was telling: he entered his office one day and discovered his secretary (not a computer geek at all) "chatting" with Eliza at great length and regularly enjoyed "conversing" with the program.
Memories ... 🙂
BTW, this thread has reminded me of a comment I made at a conference some months ago. For me, "Generative AI" (in the various capabilities available today) is not the same as the "AI" envisioned in decades past. Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon, John McCarthy ("inventor" of Lisp), and the others attending that seminal summer workshop at Dartmouth in the mid-fifties, coined the term to represent what they felt would be a non-human "artificial" system, that would interact like a human, with the world. To ultimately pass the Touring test, of course!
FWIW, Joe Weizenbaum felt that the Touring test would never be successfully met, that an "expert" would eventually be able to tell the difference between a human and an AI. The original Blade Runner movie (one of my favorites of all time) is a canonical example of this process!
Z
Syed Zaeem Hosain | Founder, Chief Evangelist
Aeris Communications, Inc.<http://www.aeris.com/>
[email protected]
a: 1731 Technology Drive, Suite 800, San Jose, CA 95110-1360, USA.
o: +1 408 557-1905 | f: +1 408 557-1925 | twitter: @AerisCTO
________________________________
From: [email protected] <[email protected]> on behalf of Bradford Miller (as bradford dot w dot miller at gmail dot com) <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, August 7, 2025 06:57 PM
To: Eben Bruyns <[email protected]>
Cc: Lisp HUG <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Just take me out back and shoot me...
CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe.
> On Aug 7, 2025, at 5:02 PM, Eben Bruyns (as eben at sdk dot co dot nz) <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Don't forget that Eliza was born out of a prank …
Cite?
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