User:Kellychen927/ELIZA effect

Significance
ELIZA convinced some users into thinking that a machine was human. This shift in human-machine interaction marked progress in technologies emulating human behavior. Two groups of chatbots are distinguished by William Meisel as "general personal assistants" and "specialized digital assistants". General digital assistants have been integrated into personal devices, with skills like sending messages, taking notes, checking calendars, and setting appointments. Specialized digital assistants “operate in very specific domains or help with very specific tasks" . Digital assistants that are programmed to aid productivity by assuming behaviors analogous to humans.

Joseph Weizenbaum considered that not every part of the human thought could be reduced to logical formalisms and that “there are some acts of thought that ought to be attempted only by humans”. He also observed that we develop emotional involvement with machines if we interact with them as humans. When chatbots are anthropomorphized, they tend to portray gendered features as a way through which we establish relationships with the technology. "gender stereotypes are instrumentalised to manage our relationship with chatbots" when human behavior is programmed into machines.

Feminized labor, or women's work, automated by anthropomorphic digital assistants reinforces an "assumption that women possess a natural affinity for service work and emotional labour". In defining our proximity to digital assistants through their human attributes, chatbots become gendered entities.