alt Hacker NewsDon’t call them therapy sessions. They kind of look like it but ultimately these are smoke blowing machines, which is very far from what a therapist would do.
Don’t call them therapy sessions. They kind of look like it but ultimately these are smoke blowing machines, which is very far from what a therapist would do.
Six decades later and we're still trying to explain to people the same things[1]:
> Some of ELIZA's responses were so convincing that Weizenbaum and several others have anecdotes of users becoming emotionally attached to the program, occasionally forgetting that they were conversing with a computer. Weizenbaum's own secretary reportedly asked Weizenbaum to leave the room so that she and ELIZA could have a real conversation. Weizenbaum was surprised by this, later writing: "I had not realized ... that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people."
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA