The Chatbot That Foretold Why People Share Secrets With ChatGPT
A look back at ELIZA, the 1960s MIT chatbot created by Joseph Weizenbaum, draws a line from those early human-computer conversations to the dynamics driving people to confide in modern AI systems like ChatGPT. Weizenbaum's own observations about how readily people opened up to his program anticipated patterns that are now playing out at massive scale.
Why this matters: People tell ChatGPT things they do not tell their doctors, their partners, or their friends. That is not a glitch. It is a feature of how these systems feel to use. ELIZA showed this tendency sixty years ago, with a far simpler program. The difference now is scale, data retention, and commercial incentives. When millions of people treat a corporate product like a confidant, the question is not whether that is psychologically understandable. It is who owns what they said, and what happens to it next.
Who should care: General readers · AI governance · Policy
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