Everybody’s talking about ChatGPT, the OpenAI tool that writes poetry, prose, and even software code like a human.
The chatter mostly gravitates toward amazement, fear, and warning — amazement at what it can do, fear of cheating and replacement by “robots,” and warnings about the perils to humanity of outsourcing creativity to machines.
All that chatter misses the moment. In fact, ChatGPT (The GPT bit stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is less amazing, less scary, and needs fewer warnings than claimed by most of the media coverage. ChatGPT is an AI language model from San Francisco-based OpenAI. It can converse with a person via text and generate a wide range of content upon request.