This AI chatbot is dominating social media with its frighteningly good essays

Key Facts

After signing up for ChatGPT, users can ask the AI system to field a range of questions, such as “Who was the president of the United States in 1955,” or summarize difficult concepts into something a second grader could understand.
Other colorful examples including asking for fairy-tale inspired home décor tips and giving it an AP English exam question (it responded with a 5 paragraph essay about Wuthering Heights.) In a blog post last week, OpenAI said the “format makes it possible for the tool to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.”
Beyond the issue of spreading incorrect information, the tool could also threaten some written professions, be used to explain problematic concepts, and as with all AI tools, perpetuate biases based on the pool of data on which it’s trained.
When Elon Musk, a co-founder of OpenAI, recently asked Altman on Twitter about the average cost per ChatGPT chat, Altman said: “We will have to monetize it somehow at some point; the compute costs are eye-watering.”