Conversational User Interfaces -- Life Learning

In fact, some of Weizenbaum's colleagues and students exhibited very strong emotional connections to the program. As the preceding passage suggests, Weizenbaum discovered something disturbing: people approached the bot as if it were a real, intelligent entity who was genuinely interested in their condition -- even when they knew that it was a computer program. This condition is now referred to as the "Eliza Effect", and although the behaviour of its sufferers isn't always as extreme as the case above (alone time with robots is not consistently requested), it propelled Weizenbaum to become a staunch critic of AI. The Eliza Effect is a prime example of how an object, in this case a typewriter, can form a visceral connection with just a few rudimentary human elements. All it took to elevate a keyboard and screen to a human level was a basic conversational program.