Inventing ELIZA (Review)

This year is the 60th anniversary of Joseph Weizenbaum’s article “ELIZA—A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine”. ELIZA was a natural language “engine” for running scripts of various conversational personas. The DOCTOR script became the paradigmatic example of a chatbot and ELIZA was re-implemented many times. A team of eight multidisciplinary scholars (“Team ELIZA”) have written an expansive historical study of the creation of ELIZA, how it was designed and implemented, its impact, and latter development of chatbots to the present day. Inventing ELIZA Book Cover Inventing ELIZA: How The First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI. 2026. By Sarah Ciston, David M. Berry, Anthony C. Hay, Mark C. Marino, Peter Millican, Jeff Shrager, Arthur I. Schwarz, and Peggy Weil. The MIT Press. Publisher Website Inventing Eliza is broad in both its scope of historical analysis and in methodology. Content-wise, the book includes a biography of Joseph…