AI glossary

ELIZA was one of the first chatbots developed in the 1960s by MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum. ELIZA played the role of a psychotherapist, with the user acting as the patient. The programming was quite simple, and ELIZA often simply repeated the user's input in the form of a question. Yet, it appeared surprisingly realistic to users, who often became convinced that ELIZA could understand them. This is an example of anthropomorphism.

Emergent behavior refers to unexpected skills or actions of AI systems, things they were not explicitly trained for but emerged from their training. Complex behaviors arise from the interaction of a large number of simple elements. For instance, LLMs operate at a basic level by guessing what token (word) comes next in a sentence. Despite this relatively simple mechanism, they are capable of giving coherent, intelligent-seeming responses to a wide range of questions. Other behaviors can be more negative, such as LLMs' tendency to hallucinate or give inappropriate responses. Much AI research relies on feeding big data into a model and seeing what happens, which involves much trial and error and unpredictable outcomes.