Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

ELIZA Reanimated: Restoring the Mother of All Chatbots

computer.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 33 posts

Re: ELIZA Reanimated: Restoring the Mother of All Chatbots

#21

Post by mindcrime »

jonbaer wrote: post #13
fsiefken wrote: post #11

I am curious, was there any improvement of ELIZA type chatbots, before the advent of LLMs. What was the state of the art of conventional chatbot tech. Perhaps some IRC chatbots were more advanced?

We developed ALICE and AIML ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence_Markup... ) as a way to program bots (some of my work included adding scripting and a learning mechanism), at the time it was open sourced but AOL literally threw it into it's AIM service at certain points. There were plenty of "connectors" for different services, but the real ironic bit was that there was a central Graphmaster class…

AIML was great. I once took a stab[1] at creating an AI Paul Graham using AIML. It more more of an amusement than anything serious, but still, messing around with AIML was cool.

[1]: https://github.com/mindcrime/pgbot

Re: ELIZA Reanimated: Restoring the Mother of All Chatbots

#23

Post by voxic11 »

fsiefken wrote: post #11

I am curious, was there any improvement of ELIZA type chatbots, before the advent of LLMs. What was the state of the art of conventional chatbot tech. Perhaps some IRC chatbots were more advanced?

Smarterchild was the best one I saw before LLMs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SmarterChild

Re: ELIZA Reanimated: Restoring the Mother of All Chatbots

#24

Post by rossant »

mindcrime wrote: post #18
diggan wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The extent to which people treated the program as though it had agency was kind of horrifying It's also horrifying how much intention people think they can see from looking at logs of people using something. I know there are a lot of "data driven" decisions that people use the same way, where people are reaching all sorts of conclusions to why X suddenly is Y, or likewise. I'm sure if someone inspected the logs of…

I'm sure if someone inspected the logs of what I've written to various LLMs they'd think they can extrapolate all sorts of personal characteristics about me, but I'm also a person who plays around with things, tries to find limits and whatever... If you looked at my LLM interaction logs you would probably assume that I have an unhealthy obsession with pirates and a napalm fetish. In reality, I use the "can I get it t…

Now explain that to the police. And to the court.

Re: ELIZA Reanimated: Restoring the Mother of All Chatbots

#25

Post by closewith »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #15

I had an ELIZA-like "chatbot" written in BASIC on the laptop I carried in high school (1991-1995). I added logging, let classmates interact with it, and then read the logs. The extent to which people treated the program as though it had agency was kind of horrifying. I can only imagine what's happening with LLMs today. It scares the willies out of me. re: my ELIZA-like logs - I was at least somewhat ethical, insofar…

> nor did I ever tell anybody that they had been logged

So the opposite of acting ethically.

No wonder we've ended up in the surveillance nightmare we find ourselves in.

Re: ELIZA Reanimated: Restoring the Mother of All Chatbots

#26

Post by jonbaer »

mindcrime wrote: post #20
fsiefken wrote: post #11

I am curious, was there any improvement of ELIZA type chatbots, before the advent of LLMs. What was the state of the art of conventional chatbot tech. Perhaps some IRC chatbots were more advanced?

> was there any improvement of ELIZA type chatbots, before the advent of LLMs There were. If you're really interested in that history, one place to look is at the historical record of the Loebner Prize[1] competition. The Loebner was a competition based on a "Turing Test" like setup and was held annually up until 2019 or so. I think they quit holding it once LLM's came along, probably because they felt like LLM's sor…

Well back then you had to be (think) original in fooling a human, and many bots made sure NOT to include copyright material. Also many of them were run locally (and in memory), so they ran faster and without the need for GPU memory (not to mention GPUs/CUDA were not readily available - or available at all - either).

Re: ELIZA Reanimated: Restoring the Mother of All Chatbots

#27

Post by mullingitover »

Obligatory: the early 2000s web site 'aoliza' which turned vanilla Eliza loose on AOL Instant Messenger, with predictably hilarious results demonstrating that the Turing Test was beaten decades ago[1].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20030812213928/http://fury.com/a...

Re: ELIZA Reanimated: Restoring the Mother of All Chatbots

#28

Post by EvanAnderson »

closewith wrote: post #25
EvanAnderson wrote: post #15

I had an ELIZA-like "chatbot" written in BASIC on the laptop I carried in high school (1991-1995). I added logging, let classmates interact with it, and then read the logs. The extent to which people treated the program as though it had agency was kind of horrifying. I can only imagine what's happening with LLMs today. It scares the willies out of me. re: my ELIZA-like logs - I was at least somewhat ethical, insofar…

> nor did I ever tell anybody that they had been logged So the opposite of acting ethically. No wonder we've ended up in the surveillance nightmare we find ourselves in.

> So the opposite of acting ethically.

I think ethical behavior is a continuum and I don't see it as binary. Then again, I'm not formally trained in ethics either.

I clearly stated I handled it only somewhat ethically, at best (i.e. "...pretty shitty to people..."). Even then, I'd argue I acted closer to the "ethical" end of that continuum than the opposite. I could have shared the logs, for example. That would be much closer to the "unethical" end of that spectrum to my mind.

I definitely handled it poorly but I could have handled it worse. For the people who were "surveilled" the impact to their lives was the same as if they had not been.

> No wonder we've ended up in the surveillance nightmare we find ourselves in.

The "user surveillance" on my personal standalone laptop computer 30 years ago doesn't have much bearing on the for-profit companies who profit from mass user surveillance today, except perhaps as being emblematic of the human nature to find novelty in "secrets". I don't think I bear any personal responsibility for the world we live in today in this regard.

Re: ELIZA Reanimated: Restoring the Mother of All Chatbots

#29

Post by abrax3141 »

cxr wrote: post #9

Discussed in January: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42746506 >

Clarification: These papers are different enough that I don’t feel like I double dipped by posting both in HN, also the new pub is ... well, new. (Also, thank you for reminding me that I need to update the arXiv entry since it’s not been published!)

Re: ELIZA Reanimated: Restoring the Mother of All Chatbots

#30

Post by spullara »

bonoboTP wrote: post #7
spullara wrote: post #2

you can use elizallm.com (it also offers the openai api just in case you need that).

ELIZA is not an LLM. This site also doesn't say what program it is actually running, any details at all. It's just a chat box without any explanation.

does eliza need some kind of explanation?
Post reply on HN