The Eliza Effect and "Body Doubling": The Reassuring Presence of Computers
New digital behaviors driven by increasing loneliness blur the lines between life and digital liveness even further.
In 1955, Joseph Weizenbaum, then at General Electric, conceived a natural language understanding program named ELIZA, paying homage to Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. The principle was to simulate a conversation between a psychotherapist and a patient using the patient's words to shape the computer's responses through three scenarios:
1. Reformulate the person's statements in an interrogative manner.
2. Recombine the person's words.
3. Display "I understand..." on the screen when neither of the first two options is possible.
At the end of this experiment, Weizenbaum discovered that some people developed genuine affection for his program and began to form attachments, even emotional dependencies, known as the Eliza effect. Thus, 70 years ago, the precursors of liveness were already being sensed.
Solitude x Digital Presence: New Uses
As discussed a year ago in Alone Together”, 15% of men and 10% of women declare having no close friends. This means that a significant minority of people has no friends at all. In France, according to IFOP, around 9.5 million French people live in chronic, endured, or sometimes chosen solitude.
This solitude has led to the emergence of various content formats on platforms, especially on YouTube. Lucile Le Goallec, consumer insight manager at Google France, provides specific examples.
"We notice a growing success in France and internationally for living alone diaries. People who live alone and share their daily lives without staging, sharing their vulnerabilities and speaking openly. Audiences recognize themselves, as evidenced by the success of Michelle Choi's YouTube channel, creating a form of reassurance."
Lucile Le Goallec
This is a way to provide support to isolated individuals and show that another lifestyle is possible. These observations are not far from the logic of "body doubling": watching someone do something through a screen would increase the chances of success in accomplishing that task.
Apple recently produced a "Study with me" video of over 90 minutes featuring actress Storm Reid using the Pomodoro technique, known to enhance concentration: three 25-minute work sessions and three 5-minute breaks between each session. Millions of views prove the interest in this type of resource.
The Risk of Replacing Life with a "Pseudo Life"
Body doubling can take more ambiguous forms through purely virtual creations, made credible through artificial intelligence. Users may not follow other humans but begin to genuinely believe in interacting with conversational agents.
The Eliza effect seems to explode with the sophistication of AI-powered chatbots. In early 2023, a Belgian individual committed suicide after developing a relationship with an artificial intelligence on the Chai application.
This tragic incident serves as proof of the loss of real presence, as developed by philosopher François Jullien in an episode of La Conversation Scientifique on Radio France. His viewpoint is that the subject's essence lies in its capacity for initiative. Clicking on a link or resource, according to Jullien, places us in a reactive state, in a pre-chewed, channeled experience with blurry contours. This is even worse in the case of a "promptism" logic, in the way we interact with tools like ChatGPT.
The thinker makes an analogy with how one prunes a tree: we don't kill it, but we diminish its growth; by cutting its branches, we make it lose its capabilities (like providing shade).
"They hear without understanding and are like the deaf. The proverb applies to them: present they are absent."
François Jullien
In other words, there is a significant risk of confusing life and pseudo-life and replacing presence, the event, with digital weight that would clip our wings.
It is not insignificant to recall this quote from Goethe: "Presence is the only goddess I adore."