 the legacy of eliza the legacy of eliza hemraj thu 10162025 852 the legacy of eliza jeff lanham submitted by hemraj on thu 10162025 845 jeff lanham linkedin url linkedin perspectives tag ai value realization expert content jeff lanham sort by latest trending the legacy of eliza jeff lanham ai value realization latest trending image the level of the negative hype surpassed that of y2k when the wrong datehandling code embedded in every device was to have been so confused by the rollover from 1999 to 2000 that the world would come crashing to a halt figuratively if not literally elevators would drop from the top floors of every building trains would derail planes would fall from the sky and microwave ovens would do whoknowswhat to us all that or nothing at all would happen depending on who was hypothesizing in hindsight while it is apparent that the risk of y2k was mostly overblown it is helpful to remember that it is at least partly due to the amount of preparation and investment that went towards avoiding the worst potential outcomes we are currently witnessing a significant and rapid growth in the capabilities of ai in some cases on a neardaily basis it is driven by huge investments from many top us tech companies and fueled by an unprecedented public interest in headinggrabbing examples like open ai s chatgpt and dalle google s bard microsoft s bing and many others these solutions are based on largelanguage models llms or largeimage models lims which take vast amounts of text or imagebased data and use it to train a machinelearning model the resulting llm or lim can then be used to generate output in the form of writing or pictures which can be both beneficial and often convincingly human aka generative ai  there has long been a keen interest in creating machines that can exhibit cognitive capabilities and conversational skills to rival human beings the first functional chatbot was eliza  a natural language processing program designed at mit by joseph weizenbaum in the mid1960s the program prompts the user to enter a comment or question and eliza s response algorithm looks for specific keywords in the input and pseudorandomly picks a response from a predefined list of phrases it repeats the promptandrespond loop until the program is terminated the result resembles a backandforth conversation between the user and the computer that made eliza one of the first programs that could even attempt to pass the famous turing test  in which artificial intelligence is measured by the ability of a machine to convince humans that it is human as well eliza s method of processing input keywords and generating output phrases is designed to mimic a personcentred psychotherapy approach in the style of carl rogers in which the therapist often reflects the patient s words to the patient that s pretty much the same thing that all modern llms do and they have a keyword list that s a billion times bigger than eliza s and a much better method for calculating responses that means they can be much more humanlike in their responses and much broader regarding the types of input they can successfully process they can be so convincing that purveyors of public ai solutions have had to inject more caveats continually disclaimers and external references to limit potential harm and liability while today s publicly available generative ai solutions are far superior to eliza in nearly every conceivable way there is one significant advantage that eliza still has privacy when you share your most important secrets with your computerbased therapist and it s eliza you can be sure that it will keep your input safe assuming a fully secured or entirely disconnected computing environment eliza s entire codebase is publicly available making the inputtooutput process transparent and understandable unfortunately the same can t be said if your computerbased therapist is chatgpt bard bing or any other generative ai offering with them you can be sure that the therapistpatient confidentiality agreement will be broken when the ai engine adds whatever comments questions and secrets you share into its gigantic database of material used to fuel its ongoing learning processes if you want to avoid or at least minimize the risks and pitfalls that come along with the potential productivity benefits of public generative ai remembering past lessons is helpful eliza provided a preview of modern chatbots and other generative ai solutions and served as an excellent example of the main differences between public external and private internal only artificial intelligence implementations y2k showed that it is better to prepare for the worst than to be unpleasantly surprised by it mainly when worst might someday actually include killer robots from the future  