Inventing ELIZA

Name: Inventing ELIZA
Author: Sarah Ciston
ISBN: 9780262052481

How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI

by Sarah Ciston, David M. Berry, Anthony C. Hay, Mark C. Marino, Peter Millican, Jeff Shrager, Arthur I. Schwarz and Peggy Weil

Foreword by Janet H. Murray

Paperback

$35.00

Paperback

ISBN: 9780262052481

Pub date: July 14, 2026

Publisher: The MIT Press

350 pp., 6 x 9 in,

MIT Press Bookstore Penguin Random House Amazon Barnes and Noble Bookshop.org Indiebound Indigo

eBook

ISBN: 9780262052498

Pub date: July 14, 2026

Publisher: The MIT Press

350 pp., 6 x 9 in,

Penguin Random House

350 pp., 6 x 9 in,

Paperback
9780262052481
Published: July 14th, 2026
Publisher: The MIT Press

$35.00

eBook
9780262052498
Published: July 14th, 2026
Publisher: The MIT Press

MIT Press Bookstore
Penguin Random House
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Bookshop.org
Indiebound
Indigo

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MIT Press Bookstore
Penguin Random House
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Bookshop.org
Indiebound
Indigo
Amazon.co.uk
Blackwells
Bookshop.org
Foyles
Hive
Waterstones

Description
Author(s)
Praise
Resources
Open Access

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 the author of A Critical Field Guide for Working with Machine Learning Datasets and of interactive critical AI tutorials using p5.js, funded by Google Season of Docs.

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.

In Inventing ELIZA, a group of eight scholars (“Team ELIZA”) lovingly and painstakingly reconstruct, explain, reanimate, and place into historical context the program itself, the many surviving transcripts of the program’s use in the 1960s, and the development of subsequent chatbots… The book is a masterful contribution to the emerging discipline of software studies. ~Science

The innovative collaboration Inventing ELIZA doesn’t just shed light on the famous first chatbot from the 1960s. It aims an array of thoughtful approaches at a software system of ever-increasing importance, incandescently illuminating ELIZA and connecting it to current developments. This book proves the importance of critical code studies and is an essential resource for understanding the past, present, and future of AI. ~Nick Montfort, author of Output

An extraordinary accomplishment in the history of computing. Inventing ELIZA couples important archival discoveries with careful materialist rigor. A crucial history of the present and essential reading for students and critics of AI. ~Scott Richmond, author of Cinema’s Bodily Illusions

Part software archaeology, part improv, Inventing ELIZA opens a backstage chat in which the recovered MAD-SLIP source code acts as a lively conversational partner, transforming a technological artifact fundamental to the history of AI into a compelling dialogue about conversations themselves. ~Rita Raley, Professor of English, UC Santa Barbara