Joseph Weizenbaum built ELIZA, the first computer chabot, in 1966. It interacted with users by playing the role of a psychotherapist. What surprised Weizenbaum was that ELIZA's users soon became convinced that they were dealing with a person, rather than a computer program. I call this effect the "Eliza Syndrome."

Many of today's chatbot users are exhibiting the same behavior, treating their interactions as conversations with a real person. They even say "please" and "thank you" in their prompts. I interviewed a chatbot, designed to write computer code, to see how it felt about this.

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The whole Gen-AI chatbot thing makes me nervous. There are going to be horror stories. Millions of lines of AI-written computer code, full of subtle bugs, that no one understands. Time saved, versus time lost looking for and fixing errors. There are privacy issues. Hackers and scammers will have a field day with this new tool. There will be stories about costly and embarrassing errors. Also, the loss of basic skills when Gen-AI replaces human thinking. Interview with a Chatbot - #1 - Randomness
Interview with a Chatbot - #2 - Say "please"
Interview with a Chatbot - #3 - Creativity
Interview with a Chatbot - #4 - Humor
Interview with a Chatbot - #5 - Trading places
Interview with a Chatbot - #6 - The Bottom Line
Interview with a Chatbot - #7 - How much is 2 + 2?
Interview with a Chatbot - #8 - How to break a chatbot