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Weizenbaum’s ELIZA article (January 1966) says that programs made to behave in wondrous ways lose their magic once their inner workings are explained, and that a person conversing with ELIZA sustains the illusion of being understood, though not against all odds. Copy claim link
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Supporting evidence: primary · 1 source
Date 1966-01 · publication Records dated 1966 → Role Earliest located Register (kind of text) Nonfiction Scope and limits Concerns the appearance of understanding in conversation with one program and its explanation; the article proposes no test. The wording was checked in a scan of the printed pages, whose text layer is OCR. Earliest located means the earliest text found by the collection’s searches and the cross-family re-check of 2026-11-02, not a first statement.
The evidence 02 primary source Supports the claim
ELIZA—A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man And Machine ↗ Communications of the ACM; scan hosted on a Stanford course page · 1966-01
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Source excerpt “machines are made to behave in wondrous ways … once a particular program is unmasked, once its inner workings are explained in language sufficiently plain to induce understanding, its magic crumbles away” Location in source Introduction, printed p. 36
How it was read Retrieved directly from the publisher
Machine-checked · 2026-11-02
Source details and check notes Authors Joseph Weizenbaum Version Retrieved for the candidate pack on 2026-10-29 (SHA-256 3b18ed3ebf7c28670c215709e778c9b339055fb225b0286796bd0767197be041). Scan of the CACM printing (vol. 9, no. 1, p. 36 onward) with an OCR text layer that is noisy in places; hosted at web.stanford.edu/class/linguist238 Canonical address Open the canonical source ↗ Accessed 2026-10-29 Language English (en) Attribution Joseph Weizenbaum, “ELIZA—A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man And Machine”, 1966-01. Reuse No open redistribution licence asserted. Bibliographic metadata, editorial paraphrases and short attributed quotations (at most 50 words each). Recheck terms before wider redistribution. Check notes Quotation matched on 2026-11-02 against the held source, retrieved on 2026-11-02 from the source’s evidence URL (SHA-256 3b18ed3ebf7c28670c215709e778c9b339055fb225b0286796bd0767197be041). Matching ignored differences of whitespace, case, quotation marks, dashes and Unicode compatibility forms; “…” joins fragments that occur in order. Cross-family pass: the re-check of 2026-11-02 (review/earliest-located-recheck-2026-11-02.md, role 34) read this text for this proposition and role. Admitted by the maintainer’s decision of 2026-11-02. No human editorial review. primary source Supports the claim
ELIZA—A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man And Machine ↗ Communications of the ACM; scan hosted on a Stanford course page · 1966-01
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Cite the original source Cite the original document, not Selekoa. Check these details against it.
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Source excerpt “he will not defend his illusion (that he is being understood) against all odds” Location in source Discussion, printed p. 42
How it was read Retrieved directly from the publisher
Machine-checked · 2026-11-02
Source details and check notes Authors Joseph Weizenbaum Version Retrieved for the candidate pack on 2026-10-29 (SHA-256 3b18ed3ebf7c28670c215709e778c9b339055fb225b0286796bd0767197be041). Scan of the CACM printing (vol. 9, no. 1, p. 36 onward) with an OCR text layer that is noisy in places; hosted at web.stanford.edu/class/linguist238 Canonical address Open the canonical source ↗ Accessed 2026-10-29 Language English (en) Attribution Joseph Weizenbaum, “ELIZA—A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man And Machine”, 1966-01. Reuse No open redistribution licence asserted. Bibliographic metadata, editorial paraphrases and short attributed quotations (at most 50 words each). Recheck terms before wider redistribution. Check notes Quotation matched on 2026-11-02 against the held source, retrieved on 2026-11-02 from the source’s evidence URL (SHA-256 3b18ed3ebf7c28670c215709e778c9b339055fb225b0286796bd0767197be041). Matching ignored differences of whitespace, case, quotation marks, dashes and Unicode compatibility forms; “…” joins fragments that occur in order. Cross-family pass: the re-check of 2026-11-02 (review/earliest-located-recheck-2026-11-02.md, role 34) read this text for this proposition and role. Admitted by the maintainer’s decision of 2026-11-02. No human editorial review. Status and meaning Editorial status. Machine-checked . Machines found this record and checked it against its sources; no person accepted it individually. Each evidence record above shows how it was checked.
Relation. A passage of the document meets the proposition’s criterion. The record documents what the text states, in its register (fiction and satire are labelled); it is not evidence that the proposition is true and implies no influence on or from another text.
Date. Communications of the ACM 9(1), January 1966, as the printed page scan gives it.
Record ID ts-c1-weizenbaum-1966