Five Remarkable Chats That Will Help You Understand ChatGPT

Move over Siri and Alexa, there’s a new AI in town and it’s ready to steal the show—or at least make you laugh with its clever quips and witty responses.

That is how ChatGPT, the powerful chatbot released last week by the AI company OpenAI, suggested that I begin this story about ChatGPT. The chatbot isn’t exactly new; it’s an updated version of GPT-3, which has been around since 2020, released to solicit feedback to improve the chatbot’s safety and functionality. But it is the most powerful to date to be made widely available to the public. It’s also very easy to use. Just write a message, and ChatGPT will write back. Because it was trained on massive amounts of conversational text, it will do so in a relatively natural, conversational tone.

True to its claim, ChatGPT. Social media has been flooded with screenshots of people’s coolest or weirdest or dumbest or most troubling conversations with the AI, which reliably serves up a mix of astoundingly humanlike prose and frequently hilarious nonsense. Limericks about . Recipes written in . Obituaries for co-workers who are alive and well. “At one recent gathering, ChatGPT was the life of the party,” ChatGPT wrote as part of a draft for this article. “As guests mingled and chatted, ChatGPT joined in the conversation, offering up clever jokes and one-liners that had everyone in stitches.”