Emacs NSA bait

Emacs NSA bait

Note, too, that the claim is not "everyone was convinced by ELIZA some of the time", but rather "some people were convinced by ELIZA some of the time".

To misquote an apocryphal quote, "there's a huge overlap between ELIZA's best output, and what people think someone really dumb would say"; the Turing Test was still in vogue when ELIZA was new, and under the rules of the test, you are "convinced" by ELIZA if you cannot determine whether you're conversing with a human, or with a bot to an extent better than random guessing - but that means that you count as "convinced" if you erroneously identify humans as the bot repeatedly.