The Tech Behind Those Amazing, Flawed New Chatbots 

In the days following the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, users were taken aback by the chatbot’s eerily sophisticated answers to an array of questions and commands. They had fun sharing its historical arguments, college “essays” and solutions to programming challenges, and joked about its cheesy poems. Only later did the full implications of a machine that can perform a wide range of tasks at superhuman speed begin to sink in. ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and other platforms driven by so-called generative artificial intelligence are being greeted in some quarters as agents of an impending economic revolution to rival the invention of the car or the internet. Other observers say they will kill entire categories of graduate-level jobs and, with no ethical conscience to match their vast capabilities, become tools for misinformation and deceit on an unprecedented scale.

It’s a type of software that can carry out complex tasks such as writing a story or creating an image in response to simple written prompts. During training, these systems are fed vast amounts of information (for example, every book available freely on the internet) and are taught how to use that data to craft something new, such as the blurb for a new novel. The systems apply what they learn from such efforts to future endeavors and their responses become gradually more sophisticated and nuanced. The results are unique and — in a sense — original, but are still effectively a complex form of mimicry.