Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI

How the original ELIZA chatbot transformed ideas about AI and society’s response to them.

As we reach the 60th anniversary of ELIZA’s public debut, Inventing ELIZA offers the first comprehensive critical analysis of Joseph Weizenbaum’s groundbreaking chatbot system through the lens of critical code studies. Drawing on extensive archival research at MIT, Stanford, and UCLA, this book presents the rediscovered original source code of ELIZA alongside previously unseen scripts that had been missing for decades, revealing a far more sophisticated system than previously documented. Sarah Ciston, David Berry, Anthony Hay, Mark Marino, Peter Millican, Arthur Schwarz, Jeff Shrager, and Peggy Weil trace ELIZA’s development (1965–1968), revealing that Weizenbaum created a chatbot within a conversational programming environment with previously unknown innovations well ahead of its time. Through close reading of both code and paratexts, the book reconstructs ELIZA’s conceptual evolution and situates it within the historical context of early AI development.

The book’s website, https://findingeliza.org, includes a faithful recreation of the first chatbot and news about continued research.