How It Works
ELIZA Effect
The human tendency to read real understanding, care or awareness into a system that is only matching patterns on the surface. It is why people disclose things to a chatbot they would not tell a colleague, and why a warm tone in an answer feels like evidence of a mind behind it.
Origin · no single documented coiner
Named after ELIZA, the 1964–66 script written by MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum, whose secretary reportedly asked him to leave the room so she could talk to it privately — a reaction that alarmed him enough to write “Computer Power and Human Reason” (1976) against the industry he had helped start. The phrase itself came later, through cognitive-science writing in the 1990s including Douglas Hofstadter’s, with no single documented coiner; this Rutgers AI Ethics Lab entry is a citable current definition.