Artificial intelligence was not invented in 2020 or 2022. Those are simply the years many people first encountered it directly. ELIZA, widely recognized as the first chatbot, was created at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966.
Simple rules, powerful reactions
ELIZA simulated a therapist by reflecting a user’s statements back as questions. The program was simple by modern standards, yet people often responded as if it understood them. That reaction became as important as the software itself.
The lineage matters
Modern conversational models are vastly more capable, but ELIZA established a question we still have not resolved: how should a system behave when fluent language makes it appear more understanding than it is? Sixty years later, responsible design still requires us to separate convincing conversation from reliable knowledge.
The MIT Press book Inventing ELIZA offers a deeper history of Weizenbaum, the program, and the ideas that followed it.