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Concept
ELIZA effect
Summary
The ELIZA effect, in computer science, is the tendency to project human traits — such as experience, semantic comprehension or empathy — into computer programs that have a textual interface. The effect is a that arises when the program's symbolic computations are described through terms such as "think," "know" or "understand."
The effect is named for ELIZA, the 1966 chatbot developed by MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum. When executing Weizenbaum's DOCTOR script, ELIZA simulated a Rogerian psychotherapist, largely by rephrasing the "patients replies as questions:
Human: Well, my boyfriend made me come here.
ELIZA: Your boyfriend made you come here?
Human: He says I'm depressed much of the time.
ELIZA: I am sorry to hear you are depressed.
Human: It's true. I'm unhappy.
ELIZA: Do you think coming here will help you not to be unhappy?
Though designed strictly as a mechanism to support "natural language conversation" with a computer, ELIZA's DOCTOR script was found to be surprisingly successful in eliciting emotional responses from users who, in the course of interacting with the program, began to ascribe understanding and motivation to the program's output. As Weizenbaum later wrote, "I had not realized ... that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people." Indeed, ELIZA's code had not been designed to evoke this reaction in the first place. Upon observation, researchers discovered users unconsciously assuming ELIZA's questions implied interest and emotional involvement in the topics discussed, even when they consciously knew that ELIZA did not simulate emotion.
In its specific form, the ELIZA effect refers only to "the susceptibility of people to read far more understanding than is warranted into strings of symbols—especially words—strung together by computers". A trivial example of the specific form of the Eliza effect, given by Douglas Hofstadter, involves an automated teller machine which displays the words "THANK YOU" at the end of a transaction.
Official source
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