The ever-evolving and never-ending human urge to have a conversational robot has led us to models like ChatGPT and Bard. These LLM-powered chatbots might be the closest to what humans have dreamed of. What’s more? Someone recently made ChatGPT and Bing AI have a conversation. Prompt after prompt, the chatbots learnt about each other, and are best pals now! 

Meanwhile, in 2017, a similar incident occurred when two Facebook’s chatty AI robots started talking to each other in their own language, and had to be shut down. The same year, Google claimed that its Translate tool had the capability to generate its own language. OpenAI too attests to that, saying, AI can indeed be encouraged to create its own language. 

All of these instances bring us to question if chatbots would really be able to generate their own language, something that humans are too dumb to understand? 

Chatbots have evolved a lot over the years and it might come as a surprise for many, but these chatbots have been around since the 1960s. Developed between 1964 to 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Eliza chatbot was the first of its kind. It was designed specifically to highlight how superficial a conversation between a man and machines can be. 

The chatbot simulated a conversation between a patient and a psychiatrist by identifying keywords and “pattern matching”. This was the earliest example of an NLP (natural language processing) computer program.