You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Okay, so the first time I ever talked to a computer was sometime in the 90s.

I was at a kids' museum and I remember the computer screen had this inviting green font,

which said, hello, I'm Eliza.

I'll be your therapist today.

And I sat down at the keyboard and just started typing.

Pretty soon I was spilling to Eliza all of my middle school friendships stress, and

incredibly, she was responding in ways that felt almost human.

My encounter with Eliza was an encounter with one of the earliest natural language processing

systems in the world it was invented in the 60s, and nowadays there are multiple systems

like this.

Spellcheck, spam filters, Siri and Alexa.

Sorry if your smart assistants are now paying attention to this episode.

But my point is that natural language processing or the ability of machines to understand

an interpret human language is undergoing a revolution.

Nowadays instead of Eliza, chat GPT is talking up a storm.

But back when Yejin Choi was in college at Seoul National University in South Korea decades

ago, AI seemed like science fiction.

I loved the intellectual appeal of it, but it looked like nothing really worked.

In fact, this is during AI winter time.

This was when people used to think AI is doomed.

See, when AI was brand new in the 50s, people were really optimistic about what it could

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