ChatGPT is the dazzling, scary future of Al chatbots

This feels like what Google, Siri, and Alexa hope to be one day.

- MARK HACHMAN

Someone on the internet wrote that ChatGPT just made the first two years of high-school homework meaningless. That assessment is not far off the mark. OpenAI's new Al text generation tool currently offers sophisticated, lengthy, and even fun responses to textual prompts, currently all for free.

ChatGPT is part Wikipedia, part researcher, part analyst, and part poet. It can write a short paper on the causes and outcomes of the French Revolution. It can write a seven-paragraph essay on why nihilism should be your personal philosophy. It can write an epic poem on the need to brush your teeth regularly. It can write a formal yet sarcastic letter to your neighbor on why he shouldn't trim your trees without permission.

It's a breathtaking development. It's also a scary one when you think about ChatGPT's potential to mimic human prose and poetry.

ChatGPT (fave.co/3YjXYgy) is currently in "free research preview," which means you can use the service for free. It does require you to sign up for OpenAI, which can be as simple as authenticating the service via your Gmail account. Once inside, you get a seemingly limitless numbers of text prompts to play with. But don’t expect this to last forever, because OpenAI typically licenses its models to third parties and then takes its own service offline.