Eliza

Fantastic! Absolutely compelling and addicting solitaire mini-game. In the face of the oppressive and unceasing flow of tech optimism, I feel an immense powerlessness. Everyday, we endorse these machines and interface with them and feed them our little me-scraps until they're our perfect little mirrors. But I'm sick of my face! Eliza (the game, not the AI) gets people. It gets what makes people tick, how we rationalize, how we speak and portrays all angles with sobering realism. It may not take a stance or have any satisfying solutions, but it captures the problem. We have all been made ill by alienation. By the disconnect between self and other, self and duty, self and idea of self, self and reality. We are stunningly distant for beings so conformist! Yet, we think only in the means we know: in progress, in new technology, new machines. Has anyone ever asked if it was progress itself that was detaching us from something? That maybe this lifestyle is deeply mentally unsustainable? That's the conversation on display, and it's captivating to follow. I'm staunchly, viscerally, recalcitrantly anti-AI. I'm anti-LLM, of course, but it is the project itself, that data can become intell…

Eliza is very topical but deeply...underwhelming. The atmosphere is great, the characters are endearing if superficial. The game raises a lot of questions it's not equipped to answer or even say anything of note about them, it just raises the questions. It feels like talking to an executive if that makes any sense; big talk about big topics but very little to say about them.

Eliza is a mature and contemplative visual novel that explores artificial intelligence, mental health, corporate technology, privacy, and the complicated boundary between genuine human empathy and automated assistance. Developed and published by Zachtronics, it takes a remarkably restrained approach to subjects that could easily have been turned into exaggerated science fiction. Instead of presenting AI through robots or futuristic disasters, the story examines a technology that feels disturbingly plausible: an automated counseling program that determines what should be said to vulnerable clients while a human proxy delivers those words in person. The story centers on Evelyn Ishino-Aubrey, a former technology professional returning to society after spending several years away from her previous career and social circle. She takes a job working for Eliza, an AI counseling service where her responsibility is not to provide her own advice but to repeat responses generated by the system. This creates one of the game's most effective sources of tension. Evelyn is physically present with people discussing deeply personal problems, yet the software controls what she says. The arrangement …

A fascinating exploration of the ethics of "ai"-like program development and the humans caught in the cogs of software companies willing to exploit developers and customers alike.

This story is about listening, about an apparently and really happening massive issue of people not speaking to each other and not listening to each other. And this is a very good and important alarm to ring or concept on which to mount the story. It's like a lack of interaction and too-complex\\too-diverse to listen to epidemic. This story and epidemics can be also explained with the values that come from the Asia Minor- Greek Culture and the aspect of envy. Our society is deeply ill from constantly confronting people watching all day long what others do and losing contact with what we ourselves do, constantly consuming itself like shown in the mythological and greek related iconography of Envy. Besides all the topics and matters I touch below, this is the real pillar or hinge of the entire plot. "Phthonus" Is the world as a massive performance extractor? Eliza might be a bit heavy for the average player and person, but I am pretty sure the vehicle Zachtronic chose for divulgative purposes is a very good one. Extremely effective as you do get involved in the gestures not only in reading or viewing, and ultimately and constantly in the understanding... AI abuse is just another e…

I remembered this game and had to check the release date. It's a visual novel set "in the near future", supposed to be somewhat dystopic. Funnily enough, real life proved to be way more depressing and precarious. It's a visual novel. Barely any gameplay there. With a good story and good art. From a time we thought things would only get slightly worse - our current boring dystopia make its critique seem somewhat naïve.