The First Chatbot’s Multiple Personalities

IEEE Spectrum AI · 1 day ago

Researchers at MIT unearthed ELIZA's original source code from archives, revealing that the 1960s chatbot was not a simple pattern-matching program but a sophisticated platform capable of adopting multiple personas beyond its famous Doctor therapist script. The source code, published in January 1966 in Communications of the ACM, showed ELIZA could assume roles discussing math, poetry, color, and other topics through different scripts like Neweng for weather small talk. The discovery demonstrates that Weizenbaum's technical innovations were more advanced than previously documented and that design decisions about language and interaction continue to influence modern AI development.