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The charm of Eliza is that it was simply a Rogerian therapist who didn't try to be intelligent.

Eliza's talent was in getting you to express yourself, free from inhibition. That doesn't require “intelligence”, but it does require the art of listening. There's nothing dumb about that.

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Sure, the overall technique of asking vague open-ended questions to elicit a response might not be dumb. But it's hard to argue that ELIZA-style chatbots are intelligent in anyway. They deliberately had no understanding at all.

Is it important to argue about whether chatbots are intelligent?

Yes if we expect them to accurately map between user input and underlying data/business logic. ELIZA has no underlying.

It sounds like you have developed particular expectations for chatbots.

Sure, if there are "dumb" bots that are way more useful than Eliza, I can drop the expectations.

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