ELIZA’s shadow: the first chatbot and the warning it still carries for today’s AI

Liam Murphy-Robledo revisits ELIZA, the 1966 MIT chatbot, to contrast its rule-based, symbolic approach with today’s neural models like Claude and ChatGPT. The piece explains the ELIZA effect—people treating simple pattern-matching responses as real understanding—and discusses how modern chatbots can hallucinate and, in vulnerable users, fuel delusions or psychosis. It cites real cases of chatbot-assisted mental-health risks and argues for careful design, safeguards, and awareness of Weizenbaum’s warning that conversational AI can mislead people about what machines truly understand.