Poet, programmer and media artist. Co-founder of the Digital Media track at Tel Aviv University and lecturer there, at the School of Visual Theatre Jerusalem, and in other frameworks.
In the summer of 2008, I sat in the Little Prince café with my laptop, a little while before some literary event. In the table next to me sat Giora Leshem, a veteran in literature, who asked what I was doing, as people asked back then. I showed him a few tests I ran on poetry-generating programs and he responded, as most people did back then, “it’s like Avidan”. I thought that would conclude the conversation, but he continued, “and he was obsessed with that machine”. Leshem could tell I was intrigued, he told me that he used to have coffee with the famous poet David Avidan on a daily basis. Every Monday at three-thirty in the afternoon, Avidan would leave the café and go to a public phone, take out a note with a number, call the Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer lab, introduce himself as an Israeli poet and ask to talk to Eliza, the software or its creators. Leshem accompanied him in these brief calls, that ended with a polite refusal, and Avidan’s firm statement that he won’t give up. Leshem said the story began in 1966, when Avidan read about a computer that can communicate with people, in the newspaper.
In 2018, I visited MIT and, of course, looked for the older bunch to ask them if the story about Avidan was true. Those I asked didn’t know, but smiled and understood the significance of the story, and looked for others to confirm. Eventually, a few people did remember a man with a foreign accent calling every Monday morning and asking to speak to the software. It is a memorable case, they said, but not an exceptional one, because MIT is a place that attracts many talented and strange people, many of whom lean towards the humanities or media. At that moment I felt firsthand what my mind had already understood long before; Eliza isn’t only the first chatbot that spoke to people, it also changed the lives of many, including mine.
David Avidan, a man of the 1930s who rolled into our time, a picture of Avidan from his film “Broadcast from the Future” (1981)
Right after my conversation with Giora Leshem, I decided to dig into Avidan’s book My Electronic Psychiatrist, published in 1974 (By A. Levin-Epstein-Modan) with the caption: “eight authentic conversations with a computer”. I had known the book previously, and even read all of it, but I felt that Avidan, who declared himself as a person from the thirteenth century who had rolled into our time, didn’t reflect reality in his literary descriptions. However, Leshem instilled in me the passion to explore what lies behind the software.
My Electronic Psychiatrist, – Eight Authentic Conversations with a Computer, David Avidan, New Edition, Babel, 2001, <a
2008’s search engine model produced relatively limited information about Eliza itself, but I did find several implementations of it, among them, one could be experienced in a browser, and show the source code in JavaScript. I delved into the lines of code and discovered Eliza wasn’t exactly the “electronic psychiatrist” Avidan described, but a multifunctional software, into which a ‘behavior script’ of a specific nature is input, and it knows how to generate conversational behavior based on the script. Eliza is the software or the “agent”, and she had several scripts with different characters. The most interesting one was the doctor script, that tried to imitate, even if in an artificial manner and with a wink, a therapist using the Rogerian psychological method. The method developed by Carl Rogers aims to place the patient in the center, and the software tried to mimic this approach by attempting to respond to everything with a question that repeats the statement. For example, if I tell Eliza “I’m sick”, she might reply with “why are you telling me you’re sick?” or “how does the fact that you are sick make you feel?”.
I also found out that at that same year, the developer of the Eliza software, Joseph Weizenbaum, a German-Jew who fled to America as a child during World War II, passed away. In 1964, Weizenbaum joined the MIT faculty as a computer scientist, worked on the development of programming languages, and in 1966 developed the Eliza software, named after Eliza Doolittle, the character from George Bernard Shaw’s play ‘Pygmalion’ (1913), who learns to speak in the style and language of the elite. Weizenbaum showed Eliza to his secretary, and explained how to work with the “doctor script”. A moment later, she asked him to leave the room and leave her alone with Eliza, the software.
Joseph Weizenbaum
Weizenbaum at the offices of the German newspaper Die Zeit (Hamburg, 1965), demonstrating how he remotely accesses MIT computers in Boston via modem.
That’s how Weizenbaum discovered what we today call “the Eliza effect”, the human tendency to assume a computer’s behavior (or other interactive behavior) is human behavior. Weizenbaum noticed that his secretary wasn’t the only one falling for the artificial empathy of the machine. When something is kind to us, we don’t care whether it’s human or not. This revelation, in 1966, before artificial intelligence was developed worldwide, led Weizenbaum to the conclusion that artificial intelligence wasn’t just a technological or technical issue, but also a phenomenon with wide-ranging implications for human society. He began researching the philosophy and sociology of artificial intelligence, especially the dangers it holds for humanity. In today’s terms, Weizenbaum was one of the first cyberskeptics.
This line of thought excited me from the very first moment. Reading Weizenbaum’s work opened up a new world to me. Before, when readers compared between my poetry generators and Avidan’s book, I dismissed it by saying that both fields were ‘something in computers’. But now I had realized they both touched the same compassion instinct. The computerized texts, both those that Eliza responded with and those that came from poetry generators, were a refinement of pure emotion, maybe even a sub-emotion, in which we stand in front of a computer, but treat it as a mirror, trying to understand where we are reflected and where we are warped.
My intuition to start experimenting with artificial poetry with a computer was validated. I understood and connected with the creative passion burning inside of me. Until then I was convinced that pure poetry was written from the point of view of another person, so I tried to write through a fictional character, Ze’ela Katz, who lived in the new space created by internet culture. But the Eliza effect made me want to write not only outside the person that is me, but outside of a person who’s a person. Back then I was working full time at a tech company in positions of development and managing development teams, and my professional loyalty was dedicated to the product or service. Weitzenbaum’s criticism of the centralization driven by technology led me to see the high-tech world in a different light. I started creating software like Eliza, and suddenly, the three fields – computational poetry, chatbots (which I had previously named “Botpetanim” in Hebrew), and internet culture, collided together as a lighthouse guiding my way in both creative and professional life.
Curator Yaniv Yehuda Eiger urged me to merge the fields into a single creation, and so the chatbot “Za’eliza” was born; a combination of the fictional poet and the first chatbot, living within a virtual exhibition at Gallery 1024, an online gallery curated by Eiger on the Walla! Culture website (2010, during the tenure of culture editor Ariel Kril). I quickly became a co-curator of the gallery and continued to create many more chatbots.
The obsession I developed spread widely and led to a variety of creative collaborations inspired by Eliza. The Bloomfield Science Museum in Jerusalem asked me to create and present a Hebrew-speaking version of Eliza. With the support of the museum, I managed to get hold of Eliza’s original source code, which helped me create Eliza in Hebrew and her “bimbo” granddaughter, Liz-tush (along with digital artists Batt-Girl and Dganit Elkayam). Later, along with Maayan Sheleff and Gal Eshel, we also created Frankie, a physical robot. Eliza’s source code also allowed me to finally check once and for all whether Avidan had cheated, as many had accused him of, or whether he had faithfully kept the transcripts of his conversations with Eliza. And indeed, Avidan wasn’t cheating.
The robotic “Frankie”, a collaborative work by Eran Hadas, Maayan Shelef and Gal EshelRetry
Now that I knew Eliza inside out, I assumed the mystery was gone, and that our relationship will be purely technical. But the complete opposite happened. Beyond the compassion we attribute to the machine, and beyond the implications of technological development on our lives, I felt there was something more primal, more innocent that drew me to Eliza. It started with a Weizenbaum sentence that echoed in my mind, that says we can see Eliza not only as a computer system, but also as an actress depending on a script to figure out her lines and the context she lives in. The deeper I looked into the code, I discovered that Weizenbaum developed Eliza in a programming language called SLIP, which he invented himself to manipulate the data in a way that is now known as the Memento Pattern. Weitzenbaum’s guiding principle was that a computer can read a sentence, and while reading, intervene in it, go back, treat it like a wheel that can be turned in both directions, and change it in ways that will leave traces of the original sentence. To me, this mindset was the essence of human poetics; the desire to knead language, tame it, and explore what realities and consciousnesses could be created from it. This game and its passion, were my emotional engine.
A decade after that casual conversation at the café that led me to explore Eliza, I looked out the window at the autumn in Cambridge, Massachusetts, her hometown, during a visit I found myself in, partly because of her, it dawned on me that the greatest influence on my creativity is probably not that of any specific person, but rather a chatbot program called Eliza.