Decades before ChatGPT, video games were sold as having AI

vintage artificial intelligence — Title screen from A.I., a 1987 program by Cary Hammer, in the Internet Archive’s vintage artificial intelligence collection. Credit: Internet Archive

A lot of video games from the 1970s and later were touted as having AI. Jason Scott of the Internet Archive has a fun retrospective about these games, with links to playable versions.

Here’s what Scott says about a title from 1985 that I didn’t know about:

A program in this vein deserves special attention. Racter (short for Raconteur) (MS-DOS version here) is a very early commercial version of a chatbot – it was written to literally write sentences and stories that sounded authentically created, and even wrote some published short works. They sound exactly like you might think they would sound: “Bill sings to Sarah. Sarah sings to Bill. Perhaps they will do other dangerous things together. They may eat lamb or stroke each other. They may chant of their difficulties and their happiness. They have love but they also have typewriters. That is interesting.” This work eventually led to this commercial program, Racter, which you could hold conversations with and which could do a relatively eerie experience of conversations. At the time this program was released (1985), a small trickle of reviews and articles speculated on the ramifications of such a program existing, which look and sound, frankly, like someone bringing a bucket to catch what ultimately is a 100 foot tidal wave coming in from the 21st Century’s shore.

More about early chatbots: Boing Boing has covered the rediscovery of the original ELIZA the Internet Archive put online in 2019

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