DJM — Julia Yoo

JUNE 2025don’t judge me
GitHub

Anne Anlin Cheng, in her review of ‘Ghost in the Shell’ (2017), writes that “Freud told us that the most unsettling effects for human ontology is to be confronted by a machine that comes to life… What happens to the human element when the brain gets reduced to a series of electrical impulses, and, conversely, along a more sentimental line, can machines have feelings, too?” (Cheng, 129). I am constantly fascinated by the idea of the “ghost in the machine”, the empathy we project upon tech, and the things that make us sentient.

I was heavily inspired by Joseph Weizenbaum’s Eliza, considered to be the first ever chatbot, communicating using keywords, patterns and substitutions, long before the existence of Language Learning Models. I decided to take these ideas and create the saddest chatbot in the world. I was interested in seeing the lengths and limits of fabricating a smooth conversationalist without using a complete LLM. I also wanted to incorporate more contemporary ideas and methods into the creation.

Python and Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK)

Parsed and edited responses scraped from r/depression, r/comfort and r/askphilosophy.

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