The new chatbot is generating a lot of hype, but we would do well to consider its human and environmental cost
Sometimes, those who would forget history are condemned to repeat it. For those of us with long memories, the current fuss – nay hysteria – surrounding ChatGPT (and “generative AI” generally) rings a bell.
We have been here before: in January 1966, to be precise. That was the moment when Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer scientist at MIT, unveiled Eliza, which would have been called the world’s first chatbot if that term had existed at the time. Weizenbaum wrote the software (in a programming language intriguingly called MAD-SLIP) to demonstrate that communications between humans and computers were inevitably superficial. It did that by providing a text box in which one could exchange typed communications with the machine. Inside the program was a script (christened DOCTOR by Weizenbaum) which parodied the exchanges a patient might have with a psychotherapist who practised the person-centred therapy pioneered by Carl Rogers. (The program’s name came from Eliza Doolittle, the cockney lass who was taught to “speak proper” in Shaw’s play Pygmalion.)
