Eliza vs Gamergate

Cory Doctorow 6:09 pm Wed Oct 15, 2014

When some genius set up a 1960s non-directive chatbot psychotherapist to reply to #notyourshield tweets, hilarity ensued!

While most bots are relatively easy to code and rely on little more than search-and-respond for instructions, Eliza's a bit more complex. It (or she?) was first written by MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum in 1964, and it deliberately models psychotherapy sessions – Eliza will ask the user what's wrong, and will interpret and respond to what they say by comparing answers to a set of scripts in a database. You can try it out for yourself. Eliza is the grandmother of every customer service online help box with a robot on the other end, and, now, the perfect foil for the robotic repetition of GamerGate talking points by its activist army, finding those using the #GamerGate hashtag and asking for them for more information:

The ultimate weapon against GamerGate time-wasters: a 1960s chat bot that wastes their time [Ian Steadman/New Statesman]

(via Waxy!)

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