ELIZA effect

The tendency to invest private feelings in a computer puzzled and concerned Weizenbaum, who worried that people’s internal reality might be replaced by that of the machine. 

Weizenbaum was also concerned by the extent to which computers “induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people” and strengthened notions of human beings as machines, by which rationality became associated with calculation. 

This became known as the “ELIZA effect,” the propensity for humans to ascribe understanding and intelligence to computer systems. Hofstadter (1995, p. 167) described it as “the susceptibility of people to read far more understanding than is warranted into strings of symbols – especially words – strung together by computers,” a compelling description written in 1995 that, nonetheless, accurately describes modern generative AI systems (e.g., ChatGPT). 

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