this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2025
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The ELIZA effect: "extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program" can "induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people" (en.wikipedia.org)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by cypherpunks@lemmy.ml to c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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source of quote in titlepage 7 of Joseph Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgement to Calculation (1976):

screenshot of PDF of page 7: Introductionintimate thoughts; clear evidence that people were conversing withthe computer as if it were a person who could be appropriately andusefully addressed in intimate terms. I knew of course that peopleform all sorts of emotional bonds to machines, for example, to mu-sical instruments, motorcycles, and cars. And I knew from long ex-perience that the strong emotional ties many programmers have totheir computers are often formed after only short exposures to theirmachines. What I had not realized is that extremely short exposuresto a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful de-lusional thinking in quite normal people. This insight led me toattach new importance to questions of the relationship between theindividual and the computer, and hence to resolve to think aboutthem,3. Another widespread, and to me surprising, reaction to theELIZA program was the spread of a belief that it demonstrated ageneral solution to the problem of computer understanding of natu-ral language. In my paper, I had tried to say that no general solutionto that problem was possible, ie., that language is understood onlyin contextual frameworks, that even these can be shared by peopleto only a limited extent, and that consequently even people are notembodiments of any such general solution. But these conclusionswere often ignored, In any case, ELIZA was such a small and simplestep. Its contribution was, if any at all, only to vividly underline whatmany others had long ago discovered, namely, the importance ofcontext to language understanding. The subsequent, much moreelegant, and surely more important work of Winograd in computercomprehension of English is currently being misinterpreted just asELIZA was. This reaction to ELIZA showed me more vividly thananything I had seen hitherto the enormously exaggerated attribu-tions an even well-educated audience is capable of making, evenstrives to make, to a technology it does not understand. Surely, Ithought, decisions made by the general public about emergent tech-nologies depend much more on what that public attributes to suchtechnologies than on what they actually are or can and cannot do. If,as appeared to be the case, the public's attributions are wildly mis-conceived, then public decisions are bound to be misguided and

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[โ€“] Denjin@feddit.uk 36 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I have mentioned ELIZA and Weisenbaum to several pro-LLM people I know and the response is always "but I'd never fall for that".

[โ€“] jlow@discuss.tchncs.de 20 points 3 days ago

Keep this handy for a live test, then:

https://archive.org/details/eliza.qb64

๐Ÿ˜ธ