Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI (Software Studies)

How the original ELIZA chatbot transformed ideas about AI and society’s response to them.

As we reach the 60th anniversary of ELIZA’s public debut, Inventing ELIZA offers the first comprehensive critical analysis of Joseph Weizenbaum’s groundbreaking chatbot system through the lens of critical code studies. Drawing on extensive archival research at MIT, Stanford, and UCLA, this book presents the rediscovered original source code of ELIZA alongside previously unseen scripts that had been missing for decades, revealing a far more sophisticated system than previously documented. Sarah Ciston, David Berry, Anthony Hay, Mark Marino, Peter Millican, Arthur Schwarz, Jeff Shrager, and Peggy Weil trace ELIZA’s development (1965–1968), revealing that Weizenbaum created a chatbot within a conversational programming environment with previously unknown innovations well ahead of its time. Through close reading of both code and paratexts, the book reconstructs ELIZA’s conceptual evolution and situates it within the historical context of early AI development.

The book’s website, https://findingeliza.org, includes a faithful recreation of the first chatbot and news about continued research.

Sarah Ciston is Professor of Computational Thinking and Aesthetic Doing at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Winner of the 2025 Ars Electronica STARTS Grand Prize, they are also the author of A Critical Field Guide for Working with Machine Learning Datasets.

David M. Berry is Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Sussex. He is the author of Critical Theory and the Digital, The Philosophy of Software, and Digital Humanities.

Anthony C. Hay has a degree in Computer Science from Imperial College, London.

Mark C. Marino is Professor (Teaching) of Writing at the University of Southern California, where he is Director of the Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab. He is also a 2023–2024 Generative AI Fellow. His previous books include 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 (MIT Press) with Nick Montfort et al., Reading Project with Jessica Pressman and Jeremy Douglass, and Critical Code Studies (MIT Press).

Peter Millican is Gilbert Ryle Fellow and Professor of Philosophy at Hertford College, University of Oxford. He is also Professor in Philosophy at the National University of Singapore and Visiting Professor in Computing and Data Science at Nanyang Technological University.

Jeff Shrager is a cognitive scientist and entrepreneur with deep technical experience in both modern and classic AI. In the early 1970s he wrote a BASIC version of ELIZA that was published in Creative Computing, introducing the entire PC generation to conversational AI.

Arthur I. Schwarz develops and supports software algorithms and language design and development of products for public use, and is the former Chair of the Orange County IEEE CyberSecurity SIG.

Peggy Weil is a multidisciplinary artist working in Los Angeles. She teaches at the USC School of Cinematic Arts.