I'm not even sure ChatGPT existed two years ago. It seems like a very odd story. I wonder what the core facts are.

I think this is unfair to the technical challenges inherent in implementing something like ELIZA (in the 60’s!).

Crude parody would be fair if it was released today. A phrase that might better account for the state of computing in the 60s would be “distant precursor to modern chatbots”.

If Wikipedia is to be believed, ELIZA was written for the IBM 7094 which boasted performance of something like 200 kflops (yes, kiloflops).

ELIZA is the name of one of the early crude (by today’s standards) chatbots, produced in the 1960s, but its not a parody of modern LLM-based chatbots for…reasons that should be obvious. (ELIZA was a parody, but not of a chatbot.)

It’s plausibly also something someone might, name a a chatbot that is a more modern, LLM-based design, but the narrative in the article seems inconsistent with it being ChatGPT based (the specific exchanges are inconsistent with it being the original ELIZA, as well.) If the story isn’t completely a fabrication, it is probably some product based around a pre-ChatGPT LLM model (possibly one of the earlier OpenAI GPT-x models or one of the other LLM’s that use GPT in the name), but trying to find a chatbot named “ELIZA” that isn’t the original is…a challenge. The original (and discussion of the “ELIZA effect” named after in conjunction with modern chatbots) makes it practically ungoogleable.

“ELIZA” could also be a name that the user supplied to a bot that allows users to name their own instances for personalization.