ELIZA Reinterpreted: The world's first chatbot was not intended as a chatbot (opens in new tab)

But .... it sounds like it was was? The original MIT SLIP version (yes SLIP not LISP) had a framework for embedding dynamic modules - so could do an early version of "learning." It feels like it was indeed more a framework for testing out different kinds of chatbot logic - maybe a meta-chatbot?

The famous DOCTOR script was just one example to demonstrate the tools's capabilities, and not the main point of ELIZA.

[Edit: the paper suggests the DOCTOR script is "ELIZA" not ELIZA, i.e. the limited version that became popular, not the full version that was built)

It at least establishes that it wasn't intended as a public chatbot. To extend your analogy: it's as if the inventor of the screwdriver threw away his tool afterwards and someone found it in his trash and mass manufactured it. The cabinet maker wasn't trying to make a [new standard tool for how to drive screws] (screwdriver) but was making a tool [to drive screws for just one project] (screwdriver).

It was intended as a chatbot in the sense that it provides an appearance of conversation when it’s basically a simple parlor trick. The technology of ELIZA wasn’t the interesting part, it was how people convinced themselves it actually had intelligence.

POSIWID.

You can plug your interview.

Emacs still has M-x doctor.

I think you misunderstand arxiv, blogging, and research papers.

(I've used/done extensively the three mentioned things before, including blogging in a research context)

arxiv is a preprint server. Blog posts can, sometimes, play the same role as research preprints. Research papers are fundamentally about having a _structured conversation_ about a topic.

This paper is arxiv at its best.

You should see some of Schmidhuber's stuff, he uses scientific journals as his blogging host.