History of
ELIZA
From the first chatbot published in 1966 to the large language models of 2026: 60 years of the illusion of dialogue.
DOCTOR — pattern script
Keyword search and reformulation. No understanding, but a very effective illusion.
LLM — generative model
Language models trained on billions of texts. Plausible conversation, but statistical.
Dialogue remains a mirror
Humans project; machines reformulate or generate. It is the relationship that makes the conversation.
Timeline
- 1964 — 1965
Genesis of the ELIZA project
Joseph Weizenbaum, a German-born computer scientist working at MIT, begins designing a program capable of simulating a conversation. The initial goal is to explore the limits of human-machine communication.
- 1966
First publication
Weizenbaum publishes « ELIZA — A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man And Machine » in the Communications of the ACM. The DOCTOR script, which simulates a Rogerian psychotherapist, quickly becomes the most famous conversation mode.
- 1970s
The ELIZA effect
Weizenbaum is struck to see users, including his own secretary, become emotionally attached to the program. He concludes that the apparent understanding of machines is often a human projection, and becomes a critic of AI's pretensions.
- 1980s — 1990s
Legacy and popularisation
ELIZA inspires many chatbots: PARRY (1972, simulated schizophrenia), RACTER (1983), and later ALICE (1995), Jabberwacky, and many others. The basic idea — pattern search and reformulation — remains central.
- 2010 — 2020
Renaissance through LLMs
The arrival of large language models (GPT, LLaMA, Mistral, Claude…) marks a turning point: chatbots no longer just reformulate, they generate coherent text. The boundary with ELIZA becomes cultural: we no longer « fall for it » as in the 60s, but the dialogue remains an illusion.
- 2026
ELIZA reinterpreted
In this museum, ELIZA 2026 is a pedagogical simulation that illustrates the difference between a pattern-based chatbot (1966) and a generative chatbot (2026). Both rely on statistics; only the latter learns from context.
What this museum offers
- ELIZA 1966 — the original DOCTOR engine, with its monochrome terminal.
- ELIZA 2026 — the modern reinterpretation, with a contemporary chatbot style.
- Compare both — send the same message to both versions and observe the difference.