TechScape: Meet ChatGPT, the viral AI tool that may be a vision of our weird tech future

AI tech, for so long a promising vision of the future but an underwhelming experience in the present, is starting to work. And the world is going to get weird as a result.

ChatGPT is the latest AI tool to go viral, sparking worry and wonder in equal measure. From our story:

Use it like a search engine, and it can answer questions that would be wildly frustrating to Google, like explaining why a particular joke is funny, or suggesting how to solve a particular programming bug.

For those who need more than a smart 13-year-old, the system also makes a fantastic partner. You can bounce ideas off it, request rephrasings, summaries or expansions, and then finesse the work in the finished project.

My beef with ChatGPT

Across the net, people are reporting conversations with ChatGPT that leave them convinced that the machine is more than a dumb set of circuits. This is despite the fact that OpenAI specifically built ChatGPT to disabuse users of such notions. Ask it if it is sentient, and it will reply:

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