I have just emerged from being engrossed by the story of Eliza, the chatbot psychotherapist, and feel that I absolutely must share it with you. An excerpt:
“And then all of a sudden it came to me: the psychiatrist. The psychiatrist asks questions in response to what the patient says. It may be partially or totally irrelevant, but the patient will interpret his words in terms of his own frame of mind. The patient assumes that the psychiatrist knows something, that he understands, that there is some sense to his words. ‘I don’t know what it is yet, but it’s not nonsense.’ And that’s how it started — then came ELIZA.
‘Well,’ says the psychiatrist, ‘perhaps… what does this remind you of?’
‘Hmm, very clever!’ thinks the patient. ‘This is a psychiatrist who really knows what I feel. I’m going to continue working with him.’”
As Weizenbaum was careful to describe in his article, in no sense does ELIZA actually understand anything its interlocutor enters. It is simply an elaborate text-generation engine, which searches for patterns in the entered text which can serve as hooks to be manipulated and recombined into its responses. The genius of the “Doctor” script is that this is also essentially what a psychotherapist often does during a session, at least from the perspective of the layman
I suggest you read the whole thing:
Photo found at The Lvumberjack Special. Origin unknown.
Webcomic is XKCD by Randall Munroe.