The Uncanny Valley of Emotional AI: When Virtual Companions Become Too Real
Ironic Echoes in the History of Heartwired Machines In the early 1960s, Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA first coaxed unsuspecting users into believing they’d found genuine empathy in a mainframe program. ELIZA’s simple pattern-matching “therapist” routine, though laughably mechanical by today’s standards, revealed a curious human tendency: we will imbue any conversational partner—even lines of code—with emotional depth if only it mirrors our own words. By the turn of the millennium, chatbots like A.L.I.C.E. and SmarterChild took up residence on AOL Instant Messenger and IRC channels, charming users with canned jokes and stilted replies. Yet behind the scenes, their rule-based engines remained
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