[HN Gopher] ELIZA Reanimated: Restoring the Mother of All Chatbots
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ELIZA Reanimated: Restoring the Mother of All Chatbots
Author : abrax3141
Score : 96 points
Date : 2025-06-17 15:57 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.computer.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.computer.org)
| spullara wrote:
| you can use elizallm.com (it also offers the openai api just in
| case you need that).
| bonoboTP wrote:
| ELIZA is not an LLM. This site also doesn't say what program it
| is actually running, any details at all. It's just a chat box
| without any explanation.
| bjt12345 wrote:
| HOW DO YOU DO. PLEASE TELL ME YOUR PROBLEM
| susam wrote:
| For Emacs users, see also: M-x doctor
|
| From its commentary [1] in the source code: ;;;
| Commentary: ;; The single entry point `doctor',
| simulates a Rogerian analyst using ;; phrase-production
| techniques similar to the classic ELIZA demonstration ;; of
| pseudo-AI.
|
| From the docstring [2] of the command: "Switch to
| *doctor* buffer and start giving psychotherapy."
|
| [1]
| https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/lisp/p...
|
| [2]
| https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/lisp/p...
| susam wrote:
| Also, here's an example session, in case someone is curious:
| M-x doctor I am the psychotherapist. Please,
| describe your problems. Each time you are finished
| talking, type RET twice. How can I explain to my
| friends that Emacs is a lifestyle choice? What do
| you think? That's not an answer, Doctor. Are you
| avoiding the question? I'll ask the questions, if
| you don't mind! I do mind, actually. This is my
| buffer, remember? Why do you say that?
| Because I'm the one holding the Ctrl and Meta keys here.
| Is it because you are the one holding the ctrl and meta keys
| there that you came to me? C-x k
| cadr wrote:
| I fondly remember M-x psychoanalyze-pinhead as well. (Though
| the actual Zippy the Pinhead quotes have long sense been
| removed.)
| anotheryou wrote:
| Authentic eliza in the browser:
| https://anthay.github.io/eliza.html
|
| (Port/rewrite I think. More details here
| https://github.com/anthay/ELIZA )
| wiredfool wrote:
| Once, way back when, I ported eliza to $lang and hooked it up to
| my AIM account. All well and good till the boss interacted with
| it for a couple of minutes before twigging on.
| cxr wrote:
| Discussed in January:
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42746506>
| fsiefken wrote:
| I am curious, was there any improvement of ELIZA type chatbots,
| before the advent of LLMs. What was the state of the art of
| conventional chatbot tech. Perhaps some IRC chatbots were more
| advanced?
| demosthanos wrote:
| Right before LLMs broke into the scene we had a few techniques
| I was aware of:
|
| * Personality Forge uses a rules-based scripting approach [0].
| This is basically ELIZA extended to take advantage of modern
| processing power.
|
| * Rasa [1] used traditional NLP/NLU techniques and small-model
| ML to match intents and parse user requests. This is the same
| kind of tooling that Google/Alexa historically used, just
| without the voice layer and with more effort to keep the
| context in mind.
|
| Rasa is actually open source [2], so you can poke around the
| internals to see how it's implemented. It doesn't look like
| it's changed architecture substantially since the pre-LLM days.
| Rhasspy [3] (also open source) uses similar techniques but in
| the voice assistant space rather than as a full chatbot.
|
| [0] https://www.personalityforge.com/developers/how-to-build-
| cha...
|
| [1]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20200104080459/https://rasa.com/
| (old link because Rasa's marketing today is ambiguous about
| whether they're adding LLMs now).
|
| [2] https://github.com/RasaHQ/rasa
|
| [3] https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
| jonbaer wrote:
| We developed ALICE and AIML (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arti
| ficial_Intelligence_Markup...) as a way to program bots (some
| of my work included adding scripting and a learning mechanism),
| at the time it was open sourced but AOL literally threw it into
| it's AIM service at certain points. There were plenty of
| "connectors" for different services, but the real ironic bit
| was that there was a central Graphmaster class which was
| extremely memory intensive. This was all before AWS and Cloud.
| FooBarWidget wrote:
| I made a private fork of ALICE back in the day and maintained
| my own response ruleset to give it a bespoke personality. I
| extended the main ALICE codebase with a TCP-based API server,
| and wrote another service that connects ALICE to IRC
| channels. I also made a GTK-based UI for starting, stopping,
| reloading and monitoring ALICE and to ease writing rule
| files. This gave me an IRC buddy that joined me in chatrooms.
|
| If I remember correctly, I also modified the Graphmaster to
| add support for rule priorities, so that I can better manage
| rules beyond the tree-based matching approach.
|
| One of the first things people would do, upon discovering
| that she's a bot, is trying to break her responses.
|
| All of this was for private use, nothing was open sourced.
| Unfortunately I think I forgot to copy it over from an old
| hard drive during a computer hardware migration, so it's gone
| now.
|
| I remember Richard Wallace writing something along the lines
| of "if I were to build an artificial intelligence, I wouldn't
| use flesh and bones, that's just a bad choice" (not a
| verbatim quote) in defense of people accusing AIML for being
| a too simple/dumb of an approach, with those people favoring
| more complex approaches. In the age of LLM, that statement
| aged both well and badly.
| mindcrime wrote:
| AIML was great. I once took a stab[1] at creating an AI Paul
| Graham using AIML. It more more of an amusement than anything
| serious, but still, messing around with AIML was cool.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/mindcrime/pgbot
| mindcrime wrote:
| > was there any improvement of ELIZA type chatbots, before the
| advent of LLMs
|
| There were. If you're really interested in that history, one
| place to look is at the historical record of the Loebner
| Prize[1] competition. The Loebner was a competition based on a
| "Turing Test" like setup and was held annually up until 2019 or
| so. I think they quit holding it once LLM's came along,
| probably because they felt like LLM's sort of obviated the need
| for it or something.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loebner_Prize
| jonbaer wrote:
| Well back then you had to be (think) original in fooling a
| human, and many bots made sure NOT to include copyright
| material. Also many of them were run locally (and in memory),
| so they ran faster and without the need for GPU memory (not
| to mention GPUs/CUDA were not readily available - or
| available at all - either).
| voxic11 wrote:
| Smarterchild was the best one I saw before LLMs.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SmarterChild
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I had an ELIZA-like "chatbot" written in BASIC on the laptop I
| carried in high school (1991-1995). I added logging, let
| classmates interact with it, and then read the logs. The extent
| to which people treated the program as though it had agency was
| kind of horrifying. I can only imagine what's happening with LLMs
| today. It scares the willies out of me.
|
| re: my ELIZA-like logs - I was at least somewhat ethical, insofar
| as I didn't share the logs with others, nor did I ever tell
| anybody that they had been logged or acted upon what I read in
| the logs. Still, I was pretty shitty to the people who interacted
| with my computer. The extent to which current "AI" companies
| won't be shitty to users is, I assume, much less than I was back
| then.
| diggan wrote:
| > The extent to which people treated the program as though it
| had agency was kind of horrifying
|
| It's also horrifying how much intention people think they can
| see from looking at logs of people using something. I know
| there are a lot of "data driven" decisions that people use the
| same way, where people are reaching all sorts of conclusions to
| why X suddenly is Y, or likewise.
|
| I'm sure if someone inspected the logs of what I've written to
| various LLMs they'd think they can extrapolate all sorts of
| personal characteristics about me, but I'm also a person who
| plays around with things, tries to find limits and whatever, so
| just because see me treating a LLM like shit for some reason
| doesn't mean you can understand the intention behind that.
|
| > Still, I was pretty shitty to the people who interacted with
| my computer
|
| I think as youngsters exploring computing without limitations,
| restrictions or honestly much thoughts at all in the beginning,
| many of us been in the same situation. As long as we learn and
| improve with experience :)
| mindcrime wrote:
| _I 'm sure if someone inspected the logs of what I've written
| to various LLMs they'd think they can extrapolate all sorts
| of personal characteristics about me, but I'm also a person
| who plays around with things, tries to find limits and
| whatever..._
|
| If you looked at my LLM interaction logs you would probably
| assume that I have an unhealthy obsession with pirates and a
| napalm fetish.
|
| In reality, I use the "can I get it to tell me how to make
| napalm" thing as a quick "acid test" around the extent and
| strength of censorship controls, and simply find asking LLM's
| to "talk like a pirate" amusing. And, also, I've found
| occasions where doing nothing more than instructing the LLM
| to talk like a pirate will bypass it's built-in inhibitions
| against things like giving instructions for making napalm.
| rossant wrote:
| Now explain that to the police. And to the court.
| kbelder wrote:
| Way back when, I had a simple hobby site where visitors could
| upload an image, I'd process it and return a transformed
| version of it in a template for papercrafting. Nowadays, I'd do
| it all client-side in javascript, but that wasn't really an
| option at the time.
|
| So the images were saved when they were uploaded, not for any
| nefarious reason, but more out of laziness. Then one day, I
| looked at the images. Yikes. I immediately rewrote it to delete
| the images after returning them, and pretty soon let the site
| die.
| closewith wrote:
| > nor did I ever tell anybody that they had been logged
|
| So the opposite of acting ethically.
|
| No wonder we've ended up in the surveillance nightmare we find
| ourselves in.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| > So the opposite of acting ethically.
|
| I think ethical behavior is a continuum and I don't see it as
| binary. Then again, I'm not formally trained in ethics
| either.
|
| I clearly stated I handled it only somewhat ethically, at
| best. I would argue closer to the "ethical" end of that
| continuum than the opposite. I could have shared the logs,
| for example. That would be much closer to the "unethical" end
| of that spectrum to my mind.
|
| I definitely handled it poorly but I could have handled it
| worse. For the people who were "surveilled" the impact to
| their lives was the same as if they had not been.
|
| > No wonder we've ended up in the surveillance nightmare we
| find ourselves in.
|
| The "user surveillance" on my personal standalone laptop
| computer 30 years ago doesn't have much bearing on the for-
| profit companies who profit from mass user surveillance
| today, except perhaps as being emblematic of the human nature
| to find novelty in "secrets". I don't think I bear any
| personal responsibility for the world we live in today.
| mullingitover wrote:
| Obligatory: the early 2000s web site 'aoliza' which turned
| vanilla Eliza loose on AOL Instant Messenger, with predictably
| hilarious results demonstrating that the Turing Test was beaten
| decades ago[1].
|
| [1]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20030812213928/http://fury.com/a...
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(page generated 2025-06-20 23:01 UTC)