KMP addressed that point:

20240214: Ken Pitman (KMP)'s Lisp ELIZA from MIT-AI's ITS history project We've added Kent Pitman's (aka. KMP, https://github.com/netsettler) MACLisp ELIZA to the elizagen repo. This was discovered by Lars Brinkhoff, and can also be found on his PDP-10 ITS historical sources repo.

KMP has been a fixture of the Lisp community for decades. Among many other lisp-related activities, he worked on Macsyma, Maclisp, Emacs, and authored the Common Lisp HyperSpec. He also chaired several of the Common Lisp standards subcommittees. He has written several interesting essays on the history of lisp and lisp-adjacent artifacts and activities, available here: https://nhplace.com/kent/Papers/.

In the late 1970s, when he started at MIT, KMP took Joseph Weizenbaum's Intro to Programming (6.030), where he was introduced to ELIZA. Probably having seen Bernie Cosell's BBN-Lisp ELIZA, KMP wrote a version of his own on ITS, a locally-developed OS on PDP-10s, that were the main computers in the MIT-AI lab. ITS had a slightly different version of Lisp (MACLisp vs. BBNLisp), so Cosell's code couldn't be run directly, also KMP wanted to hack the program a bit. He writes:

"While [this code has] definitely got my work in it, it's pretty clearly built on someone else's work. Back then there was not a sense of publication so much as just making existing things better. And everything was a proto variant of free software because there was no place one realistically expected one would sell anything. It was just hack upon hack in that environment. Both intellectual property law itself, and my naive understanding of it, was quite different then."

KMP provided some additional thoughts on his ELIZA:

"The thing about the DOCTOR program, while it was quite elaborate, was that it sort of missed the point of what Weizenbaum was trying to say. It's not that I didn't understand him, but it took me a long time to really come to viscerally understand the seriousness of his point. He said that (paraphrasing, maybe badly, from memory) long before we got to real AI, we would get to things that seemed smart but weren't, and we would overly trust systems that were not really smart. He was, for example, very worried about computerized launch of nuclear missiles using what was then thought to be AI. But the point of the original ELIZA was not to BE elaborate, it was to be simple, and to show how even a tiny, tiny program could seem smart. It was hard not to think it could be smarter if it were not so tiny, but that misses the point, which was about how easily we were confused, not about how much more effectively we could be confused if more energy were put in. So whether my DOCTOR or any other was making the right point was hard to say. My guess is not."