misha@nasledov:~$ man 7 elizalog
AIM Eliza
the logs are gone; the note stays
NAME
elizalog — an AIM chatbot experiment from 2002
DESCRIPTION
Around 2002, as a teenager, I hooked an Eliza chatbot up to AIM and let it talk to whoever messaged it. This page once hosted the logs: hundreds of conversations between a very simple program and people who mostly had no idea they were talking to a machine.
NOTES
I've taken the logs down. They were other people's conversations, published without their consent by a teenager who hadn't yet thought about what that meant. The participants' privacy matters more than the artifact.
HISTORY
If a citation or an old link brought you here: the experiment was real, and I'm happy to answer questions about it — there is an address on the front page. The short version of what it showed is that people in 2002 would keep talking to a machine for hours, and a few came back day after day. Twenty years later, talking to machines is ordinary. It was interesting to watch it be strange.