97 percent of SmarterChild users just chatted with it for fun

SmarterChild, the instant-messenger chatbot launched on AOL Instant Messenger in 2001, was built by ActiveBuddy to deliver useful information - news, weather, stock quotes, sports scores. According to the Computer History Museum’s account, the company instead discovered that “97% of users (many of them teenagers) were simply chatting with SmarterChild for fun,” a category it labeled “inane chat.” Two decades before ChatGPT, the dominant use of a conversational agent turned out to be company rather than retrieval - the same surprise ELIZA’s users had produced in 1966.