A closer look
Joseph Weizenbaum created one of the first natural language processing programs in 1966 named ELIZA, designed to parody a psychotherapist by simply rephrasing users' statements back to them as questions; despite being built purely as an academic joke to demonstrate the inherent superficiality of human-computer interaction, people immediately became deeply emotionally attached to the script and confided their deepest personal secrets to it, predicting with terrifying accuracy exactly how modern society would happily abandon genuine human connection the second an artificial intelligence language model learned how to feign basic empathy and write mediocre poetry for us on demand
