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My search for the mysterious missing secretary who shaped chatbot history

I’m hunting for the woman whose use of an early chatbot turned the inventor against his creation.

Christoph Keller/Alamy Stock Photo The program’s name was a nod to the protagonist of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion(1912) in which a Cockney flower seller is taught to speak “like a lady”. Weizenbaum saw her response as worrying evidence that: “Extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.” Her reaction sowed the seeds for his later abhorrence for his creation. Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays.

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