How To Psychoanalyze Yourself
Using 1964 Vintage AI
Way back in the 1960s computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum wrote a famous computer program named ELIZA that mimicked Psychoanalytic Sessions using techniques pioneered by Carl Rogers.
Psychology Today describes the approach like this:
Person-centered therapy, also known as Rogerian therapy or client-based therapy, employs a non-authoritative approach that allows clients to take more of a lead in sessions such that, in the process, they discover their own solutions…
It was a concept that turned upside-down established notions of therapeutic practice of the time, such as psychoanalysis and behaviorism.
During person-centered therapy, a therapist acts as a compassionate facilitator, listening without judgment and acknowledging the client’s experience without shifting the conversation in another direction. The therapist is there to encourage and support the client without interrupting or interfering with their process of self-discovery, as they uncover what hurts and what is needed to repair it.
Weizenbaum’s big discovery was that primitive computer scripts, if constructed with the correct empathetic approach, can deliver very convincing results at imitating humans. To the point that many users became emotionally attached to their mainframe based therapists. Because people often attributed human-level intelligence and empathy to the simple program, the phenomenon became known as the "ELIZA effect". The question arises, is to whether the current generation of chatbot addicted users (and investors) is also a victim of the ELIZA effect, and is reading intelligence into regurgitated input that does not exist.
Thanks to the work of the development team at masswerk.at in Austria, you can now run a psychoanalysis session in the comfort of your cubicle, using this link.
The program only has speech output (no speech recognition) so you have to type in your side of the conversation in the terminal, and the ELIZA program will respond using text-to-speech over your loudspeaker.
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