Two weeks ago, like most people, I hadn’t so much as heard of ChatGPT. By last week, I was hearing of practically nothing but. After OpenAI released its large-language model chatbot for the public to play with, it passed a million users in five days flat. Hype poured in. Columnists asked it to write the opening paragraphs of their columns about ChatGPT – with, of course, hilarious results.
Educationalists worried that this new AI chatbot would render coursework redundant and require a return to timed exams, so swift and plausible are its responses to prompts like ‘write me an essay about the causes of the first world war’. Computer programmers reported that it was ace at writing passable but not strictly functional bits of computer code. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman asked simply: ‘Will robots take away our jobs?’
By last night, so overwhelmed was it with trivial requests from drunk people, it had hoisted the flag of surrender, like Twitter’s famous ‘fail whale’. Of
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