Eliza review – an ambitious, unsettling play about the birth of AI
TL;DR
Melbourne Theatre Company While the cast is excellent, a play that sends us back to artificial intelligence’s genesis moment should feel more human than this It can be fiendishly difficult to write plays about contemporary obsessions, not least because they can shift and mutate in the time it takes to mount a production. A clever solution is to set your work at the point in history where said obsession began; that way you can still create resonant theatre within more stable boundaries.
Nauti's Take
“Eliza” is a useful prompt to revisit Weizenbaum’s work and the limits of early language systems. For today’s teams, the practical test is to separate a system’s actual capabilities, data foundation, and the human tendency to project intelligence onto fluent output.
This is a single theatre review, so its claims about historical accuracy and staging remain only lightly verified.
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