Abstract

In 1966, Stanford psychiatrist Kenneth M. Colby published one of the first conceptual accounts of a chatbot for psychotherapy. It was the same year in which, at MIT, computer-science pioneer Joseph Weizenbaum released his famous natural-language processing program ELIZA, which many regard as the world’s first chatbot. The two concurrent publications marked the starting points of a fierce controversy about the moral limits of automating psychotherapy. With the advent of generative AI, many of the same questions are now reappearing. Revisiting the early debate can therefore inform discussions on the boundaries of AI-based therapy at a time when it is being considered once again.