OpenAI chatbot

OpenAI's new platform promises entertainment, industry disruption—and plenty to worry about.

[death of the college essay at the hands of ChatGPT](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/chatgpt-ai-writing-college-student-essays/672371/)—and I tend to agree. In the midst of my talks with the chatbot, I tried to test its historical knowledge and asked it to write me an essay about the [1953 coup](https://gizmodo.com/release-of-u-s-historical-documents-delayed-due-to-ira-1673225678) in Iran. Grasping for really weird stuff to try with the program, I recently instructed it to write “an erotic story” involving undersea creatures. In addition to the above, the chatbot has now also written me a hilarious “Jay-Z song” about a toilet, poems about Howard Hughes, the Syrian Civil War, and the TV detective Columbo, and a multi-part fiction series about a battle of wills between an old sea captain and a giant clam. In an effort to get to know the program, I did what I usually do with people I’m trying to get to know and cycled through a series of basic topics: pop culture, TV shows, recent events, pets. In an effort to test this out and gauge its abilities, I started asking the program to write me short stories—and that’s when things got really weird. Just like DALL-E uses machine learning and algorithms to spin up bizarrely beautiful works of [digital art](https://gizmodo.com/seinfeld-dall-e-ai-artworks-nightmares-1849028244) at the click of a button, ChatGPT employs similar technology to make you feel like you’re messaging with a real person. Often this thing is a rough approximation of the correct answer. For instance, in regards to the AI question, it provided the following response: [founded](https://onezero.medium.com/openai-sold-its-soul-for-1-billion-cf35ff9e8cd4) by Elon Musk, the artificial intelligence-fueled platform [ChatGPT](https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/) has garnered well over a million users in a matter of days. [stated](https://twitter.com/sama/status/1599669571795185665?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1599669571795185665%7Ctwgr%5E3db49ccfc92ecefe52ef42bfe582ee58fd12eec5%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Findianexpress.com%2Farticle%2Ftechnology%2Ftech-news-technology%2Fopenai-chatgpt-crosses-1-million-users-ceo-says-they-might-have-to-monetise-this-8306997%2F) that there are plans to monetize the service at some point in the future, though he hasn’t elaborated on how or when that might happen. [physics](https://twitter.com/pwang/status/1599520310466080771), do your [homework](https://stratechery.com/2022/ai-homework/), or [write you a poem](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/12/chatgpt-does-a-thomas-schelling-poem.html), if you ask it to.