How a 1960s MIT Chatbot Predicted Our Urge to Confide in AI

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In the 1960s, MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum developed one of the earliest chatbots, known as ELIZA. The program was designed to simulate conversation, and users quickly began interacting with it in surprisingly personal ways. The patterns of human behavior observed during those early exchanges foreshadowed how people would later engage with modern AI tools like ChatGPT. Weizenbaum's experiment laid important groundwork for understanding the psychological dynamics between humans and conversational AI.

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