[New]Eliza Effect
Jan 10th, 2005 by Ashley
– Learn a new thing everyday –
Eliza Effect
The tendency of humans to attach associations to terms from prior experience.
For example, there is nothing magic about the symbol `+' that makes it well-suited to indicate
addition; it's just that people associate it with addition. Using `+' or `plus' to mean addition in a
computer language is taking advantage of the ELIZA effect.
This term comes from the famous ELIZA program by Joseph Weizenbaum,
which simulated a Rogerian psychotherapist by rephrasing many of the patient's statements
as questions and posing them to the patient. It worked by simple pattern recognition and
substitution of key words into canned phrases. It was so convincing, however,
that there are many anecdotes about people becoming very emotionally caught up in dealing
with ELIZA. All this was due to people's tendency to attach to words meanings which the
computer never put there.
The ELIZA effect is a Good Thing when writing a programming language,
but it can blind you to serious shortcomings when analyzing an Artificial Intelligence system.
FURTHER READING
ELIZA is a famous 1966 computer program by Joseph Weizenbaum, which parodied a Rogerian
therapist, largely by rephrasing many of the patient's statements as questions and posing them
to the patient. Thus, for example, the response to “My head hurts” might be “Why do you say
your head hurts?” The response to “My mother hates me” might be “Who else in your family hates
you?”
It is sometimes inaccurately said that ELIZA “simulates” (or worse, “emulates”) a therapist.
Weizenbaum said that ELIZA provided a “parody” of “the responses of a nondirectional
psychotherapist in an initial psychiatric interview.” He chose the context of psychotherapy
to “sidestep the problem of giving the program a data base of real-world knowledge”, the
therapeutic situation being one of the few real human situations in which a human being
can reply to a statement with a question that indicates very little specific knowledge of the
topic under discussion. For example, it is a context in which the question “Who is your favorite
composer?” can be answered acceptably with responses such as “What about your own favorite
composer?” or “Does that question interest you?”
Eliza worked by simple pattern recognition and substitution of key words into canned phrases.
It was so convincing, however, that there are many anecdotes about people becoming very
emotionally caught up in dealing with ELIZA. All this was due to people's tendency to attach
to words meanings which the computer never put there.
In assessing the impact of ELIZA, recall that in 1966 interactive computing (via a teletype) was new.
It was a decade before the Colossal Cave adventure game spawned the interactive fiction genre; a
decade and a half before the personal computer became familiar to the general public; and two
decades before most people encountered attempts at natural language processing in Internet
services like Ask Jeeves! or PC help systems such as Microsoft Word's Clippy. Even today, ELIZA
is amusing and capable of inducing suspension of disbelief. Its responses, while less useful than
those of Ask Jeeves! or Clippy, often seem to demonstrate a deeper level of understanding.
In 1966, ELIZA was staggering.
Lay responses to ELIZA were disturbing to Weizenbaum and motivated him to write his book
Computer Power and Human Reason. From Judgment to Calculation, in which controversially
he explains the limits of computers, as he wants to make clear in people's minds his opinion
that the anthropomorphic views of computers are just a reduction of the human being and any
lifeform for that matter.
ELIZA was named after Eliza Doolittle, the working-class character in Shaw's Pygmalion who is
taught to speak with an upper class accent.
Source: Wikipedia