The Eliza Effect (Preface 4)

In this section, Hofstadter talks mostly about the "Eliza Effect" and relating it to other critically acclaimed programs in the field of artificial intelligence. Hofstadter defines the Eliza Effect as, "The susceptibility of people to read far more understanding than is warranted into strings of symbols - especially words - strung together by computers". In short, this means that people tend to give computers too much credit in terms of it's "intelligence" rather than it's systematic functionality. To a computer, a string is a string, whether that string is a name or a incomprehensible combination of random letters, has no meaning to the computer. This is a misunderstanding that the general public has.

Much of this section is used by Hofstadter to demonstrate that exact point. In particular, Hofstadter uses the ACME program, which received much praise, to demonstrate this. The ACME program takes a set of objects and predicates, and strings them together to create a pattern or "story". Hofstadter makes his point by merely substituting these some of these strings for single letter representations. This makes the resulting pattern look like nothing more than random clutter. While the programs Hofstadter mentions in this section do accomplish something are deserve some credit, this Eliza Effect gave way to them being viewed as something much greater than they really are.