AI or Ain't: Eliza

Here is the pointer to the original Eliza paper https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/365153.365168

Note that Weizenbaum was an AI critic: Weizenbaum's intention was not for Eliza to pass the Turing test, but to show to people that a clearly not intelligent program based on primitive pattern matching can appear to behave intelligently.

He failed: His own secretary wanted to be left alone with the software and typed in her personal problems. Work on Eliza (1963-65, paper published 1966) until today is mostly misunderstood.

> Clearly, Eliza is not an AI

Sadly the author doesn't elaborate on this. I thought nowadays 'AI' is a synonym for 'algorithm', which would fit ELIZA

Is there an accepted definition of the word AI?

Eliza's meant to us to be an illustration of the problem. In good old fashioned AI sentiment, it illustrates the fact that you need another if statement for every new kind of construct you want to simulate. But you deign to simulate each thing, like say turning a verb into a gerund, by writing a specific "gerundification" routine. Another to swap the Mes to Yous, etc. this isn't how people think nor most modern AI. This is totally different from just looking at the world distilling patterns from it and using those patterns as the basis for a response. To teach a modern AI new stuff, you don't have to write another if statement. They have similar intentions and at some resolution or distance, they are trying to do similar things. However, they work and totally different ways and the new dynamic generative AI strategy that learns from input as opposed to just symbolically transforming it syntactically is a totally different paradigm. I don't care whether you call it AI or not.

Any algorithm you do not understand.

Not only his secretary, also some psychiatrists wanted Eliza as a tool to scale up their work clinically.