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I don\u2019t know when I first heard the story of Joseph Weizenbaum, but it was a long time before our screens and news and thoughts and dreams and nightmares were so full of artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
He was on a temporary contract at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the mid-1960s, working for Project MAC, which had the aim of making computers more widely accessible. Seemingly to help achieve this aim, Weizenbaum developed the world\u2019s first chatbot, on a computer the size of a room, that heated an entire building, and had just 150 kilobytes of memory.<\/p>\n
Named after Eliza Doolittle from George Bernard Shaw\u2019s Pygmalion, Weizenbaum\u2019s creation was a play on Rogerian psychotherapy, a non-directive type of talk therapy created by Carl Rogers in the 1940s. Eliza could recognise words such as \u201cmother\u201d or \u201cfather\u201d, change \u201cI\u2019s\u201d to \u201cyou\u2019s\u201d and very, very basically, ask input sentences back as questions. If it couldn\u2019t compute how to do this, it would use the disguise of Rogerian therapy to say things like, \u201cplease go on\u201d or \u201cI\u2019m not sure I understand you fully.\u201d<\/p>\n
Weizenbaum actually had ulterior motives. He was already sceptical of the concept of AI, and saw Eliza as the chance to remind the world how farcical the concept of intelligent machines was. He wrote a paper about the program, publishing sections of its basic code, to say, \u201cLook! This is so simple and yet it can appear intelligent!\u201d Because, for him, appearance was as close as a computer could ever get to human intelligence.<\/p>\n
![\"Joseph](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/bc6009dc66e87047f27a21fe081e93bbe05ae8b6.jpeg\")
Joseph Weizenbaum\u2019s invention came to haunt him.Getty Images<\/p>\n
He was sure his paper and this apparent joke would show the world how right he was. But the world didn\u2019t take it the way he intended.<\/p>\n
Eliza was celebrated. Prominent voices in the American therapeutic world thought it could be rolled out across the country to help with the therapy shortage. Then he discovered his own staff, the people who had helped create it, were sneaking in and using it without his knowledge and refusing to hand over their transcripts, calling them \u201cprivate\u201d conversations between \u201cme and her\u201d. Most famously of all, his secretary asked him to leave the room when she was \u201ctalking to Eliza\u201d.<\/p>\n
It has even come out that, in the very same building, under a disguise, was a government agency that also claimed the word \u201cintelligence\u201d; Weizenbaum, who had fled a growing Nazi Germany in 1936, was eventually forced to confront the fact the Pentagon was a major funder of his work.<\/p>\n
His invention (or joke) had been received in exactly the opposite way he had intended. It was a nightmare for him. He received tenure at MIT on the back of this misunderstanding and nothing he could do seemed to sway people\u2019s views of his creation.<\/p>\n
I guess that\u2019s the risk you take when you create and put something out into the world.<\/p>\n
So, as the world was heating up over AI, and I wondered how I could creatively respond to all this, the first thought I had was to look back in order to understand something that seems to be so much about the future. I went to Weizenbaum, his secretary and their invention, and it was all there: all the contemporary worries about people falling in love with chatbots, about privacy, about environmental damage and, perhaps worst of all, all the legitimate fear about who is behind it and what their intentions are.<\/p>\n
![\"Dan](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/2ca163d6fc4e93003243e109190209cdffb7d9e7.jpeg\")
Dan Spielman as\u00a0Joseph Weizenbaum and Manali Datar as his secretary, Becky, during rehearsals for Eliza.Charlie Kinross<\/p>\n
My play is set in 1966, as Weizenbaum releases his creation and finds himself in a maelstrom of delusion.<\/p>\n
To write it, I did something very un-AI: I talked to people. Weizenbaum\u2019s daughters were a huge help. I talked to Jewish consultants about the early post-World War II Jewish experience, to computer engineers at MIT during the \u201960s, to the people who rediscovered Weizenbaum\u2019s files he had hidden in the MIT archives. I talked to friends and family and anyone and everyone to hear about their dreams and fears for this technology.<\/p>\n
I also talked to a friend and collaborator of Weizenbaum about the mythical secretary who was never named, and then I got to share this name with an academic researching the lost women of computing history. Wonderfully, the academic and the secretary shared a name: Becky!<\/p>\n
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<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Director](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/8ed0a90a78a7a84c29db47840ad342401c5ecfa2.jpeg\")
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