The origin of prompting: Turing, ELIZA, or ChatGPT spark debate
A Reddit debate questions if prompting began in 1950, 1966, or 2022.
A recent Reddit thread posted by u/mrsskonline has sparked a viral debate about the true origin of prompting, asking the community to choose a date for a hypothetical 'Prompt Day.' The three leading candidates span seven decades: 1950, when Alan Turing introduced the concept of human-machine conversation in his seminal paper; 1966, the year Joseph Weizenbaum launched ELIZA, the first chatbot that used pattern-matched prompts to simulate a psychotherapist; and 2022, when OpenAI released ChatGPT, bringing prompt-based interaction to over 100 million users in two months.
The discussion highlights that while the tools and models have evolved dramatically — from ELIZA's primitive scripts to GPT-4's 1.7 trillion parameters — the underlying principle remains the same: the right question shapes the machine's response. Some users argued that 1950 represents the theoretical birth of prompting, while others insisted that ELIZA's practical, interactive model is more significant. The post reveals a broader trend: as AI becomes ubiquitous, the tech community is reexamining its history, realizing that many 'new' ideas have roots in decades-old research.
- Three dates proposed for Prompt Day: 1950 (Turing's theoretical framework), 1966 (ELIZA's first implementation), and 2022 (ChatGPT's mass adoption).
- The Reddit thread from u/mrsskonline received hundreds of comments debating the philosophical and technical origins of prompting.
- Many users noted that the core concept of shaping machine responses through questions predates modern LLMs by over 50 years.
Why It Matters
This debate reframes prompting as a timeless human-machine interaction principle, not just a ChatGPT-era fad.