James Gleick Reviews Inventing ELIZA in the New York Review
The MIT Press history by Mark C. Marino, Sarah Ciston, Peggy Weil and five co-authors rebuilds Joseph Weizenbaum’s chatbot from its rediscovered source code.
James Gleick has reviewed Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI in the Nov. 5 issue of The New York Review of Books, pairing the MIT Press history with Sherry Turkle’s Artificial Intimacy. Mark C. Marino, the digital-literature scholar and game maker who is one of its eight authors, shared the review on Instagram.
The book is the first comprehensive critical study of Joseph Weizenbaum’s 1960s chatbot, drawn from archives at MIT, Stanford and UCLA. It prints ELIZA’s rediscovered original source code next to scripts that had been missing for decades, follows the program’s development from 1965 to 1968, and, in the publisher’s description, shows Weizenbaum building “a chatbot within a conversational programming environment” with innovations well ahead of its time.
The authors are Sarah Ciston, David M. Berry, Anthony C. Hay, Marino, Peter Millican, Jeff Shrager, Arthur I. Schwarz and Peggy Weil, with a foreword by Hamlet on the Holodeck author Janet H. Murray. The paperback has been out since July 14 at $35, timed to the 60th anniversary of ELIZA’s public debut. A companion site runs a faithful recreation of the 1966 program.
Marino works in critical code studies, the practice of reading source code the way critics read literary texts, and the book reads ELIZA through that lens.
For more reading, see a 2011 piece on Marino's case for reading code as text and an archive piece on playing therapist to a chatbot.
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