[aldousd666]

Eliza's meant to us to be an illustration of the problem. In good old fashioned AI sentiment, it illustrates the fact that you need another if statement for every new kind of construct you want to simulate. But you deign to simulate each thing, like say turning a verb into a gerund, by writing a specific "gerundification" routine. Another to swap the Mes to Yous, etc. this isn't how people think nor most modern AI. This is totally different from just looking at the world distilling patterns from it and using those patterns as the basis for a response. To teach a modern AI new stuff, you don't have to write another if statement. They have similar intentions and at some resolution or distance, they are trying to do similar things. However, they work and totally different ways and the new dynamic generative AI strategy that learns from input as opposed to just symbolically transforming it syntactically is a totally different paradigm. I don't care whether you call it AI or not.

[masswerk]

With the small reservation that this is not how Eliza works. Eliza sits on top of MAD/SLIP which does all the heavy work and provides lists and integer indexes, which is what is processed by Eliza. This allows Eliza to work on decomposition rules, which isolate keywords per position and context, and transformation (composition) rules to recombine elements and links between those two. Meaning, the model is much more topological than this. (Arguably, this is closer to regular expressions than to if-else trees.)

However, this isn't what Eliza is all about. It's rather about the question, how little do you actually need in terms of knowledge, world model, or rule sets to give the impression of an "intelligent" (even sympathetic) participant in a conversation (as long as you're able to constrain the conversation to a setting, which doesn't require any world knowledge, at all.) To a certain degree, it is also about how eager we are to overestimate the capabilities of such a partner in conversation, as soon as some criteria seem to be satisfied. Which is arguably still relevant today.

The rule set, BTW, is actually small, just 3 pages in a printout, achieving a surprising generality (or rather, appearance thereof) for its size. Compare: https://cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/572/S02/weizenbaum.eliza.1...

[pixl97]

>how eager we are to overestimate the capabilities of such a partner in conversation, as soon as some criteria seem to be satisfied. Which is arguably still relevant today.

Honestly, AI shouldn't be the takeaway point here, but how we do the same for politics.

[masswerk]

On a not so serious note, most political careers seem to be built on public utterances that seem to be generated by a rule set that could fit into 3 pages, triggered by a handful of keywords or trigger phrases, also known as talking points. With the advent of the so-called culture wars, most of this is also increasingly context-free and doesn't require much of world knowledge. Users, err, voters will fill in the gaps eagerly, each according to their respective phantasies and understanding. To the point that Eliza may eventually become a worthy contestant. An approval rate of 27% is certainly a good starting point…