Fury.com: AOLiza. Hilarious transcripts of AOL chat-room denizens trying to engage a version of ELIZA. ELIZA was Joseph Weizenbaum’s 1966 creation, a program that simulates a Rogerian therapist by parsing excerpts from its interlocutors’ comments and reflecting them back as questions.

Using a publicly available Perl version of ELIZA, a Mac with nothing better to do than
play psychoanalyst, a few applescripts, and an AOL Instant Messenger account that has a high rate of
‘random’ people trying to start conversations, I put ELIZA in touch with the real world. Every few days
I’ll put up the latest ‘patients.’ Names have been changed to protect the… well, everyone.

Some claim that ELIZA passes the Turing Test, in which subjects cannot determine if they are talking to an actual human being. I’m not sure these AOL chatters pass the Turing Test themselves, though, after reading this…