Sarah Ciston, David M. Berry und Team: Inventing ELIZA. How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI

This year, we have reached the 60th anniversary of the public debut of ELIZA, one of the first chatbots in history and the program that made Joseph Weizenbaum famous. In their book Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI, an international group of eight researchers offer the first comprehensive critical analysis of this groundbreaking chatbot system through the lens of critical code studies. Drawing on extensive archival research, Sarah Ciston, David M. Berry, Anthony Hay, Mark Marino, Peter Millican, Arthur Schwarz, Jeff Shrager, and Peggy Weil trace ELIZA’s development (1965–1968), revealing that Weizenbaum created a chatbot within a conversational programming environment with previously unknown innovations well ahead of its time. Through close reading of both code and paratexts, the book reconstructs ELIZA’s conceptual evolution and situates it within the historical context of early AI development.

Two co-authors of the book, media artist Sarah Ciston and media theorist David M. Berry, will visit the Weizenbaum Institute to present the book, reflect on their work and findings, and discuss related questions with the audience. Other co-authors are planned to join the event virtually. The complete evening program and panel lineup will be announced well before the event.

The event is organized by Christian Strippel, research group lead of the Weizenbaum Panel and the Methods Lab.

Registration is required to participate. The registration link will be available a few weeks before the event.

Sarah Ciston is Professor of Computational Thinking and Aesthetic Doing at Academy of Media Arts Cologne and an artist-researcher building tools to bring intersectional, critical-creative approaches to machine learning. They won the 2025 Ars Electronica STARTS Grand Prize, were named “AI Newcomer” by the German Informatics Society, and were an AI Anarchies Fellow at the Akademie der Künste. Ciston is the author of A Critical Field Guide for Working with Machine Learning Datasets.

David M. Berry is Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Sussex and Otto Mønsted Visiting Professor, CBS, Denmark. He is the author of Critical Theory and the Digital (2014), The Philosophy of Software (2011), and co-author of Digital Humanities: Knowledge and Critique in a Digital Age (2017). His new work focuses on vector theory and his latest book is titled Artificial Intelligence and Critical Theory (forthcoming, 2026).