The ventriloquism of PARRY-ELIZA: Schizophrenic language in computational writing

This paper interrogates the ambiguous claims of ‘language’ in Artificial Intelligence by reframing early chatbot systems PARRY and ELIZA not as simulations of human dialogue, but as literary devices that foreground the medial and material conditions of language. Moving beyond notions of AI as expressive or generative, the paper explores how schizophrenic languages, drawn from a functionality of brain in human-computer interaction, Hannah Weiner’s clairvoyant poetics, and Roman Jakobson’s theory of shifters, condition computational writing as a functional, spatial-temporal operation. PARRY and ELIZA’s ventriloquism reveals not a thinking subject but a machinic structure of enunciation embedded in code, interface, and machine-to-machine communication. Rather than evaluating content or intelligence, the analysis highlights execution, performativity, and disability as key qualities of computational writing. Situating AI systems within a media archaeology of schizophrenic language, the paper shows how their operative literariness reframes themselves as autonomous media of computational writing.