ChatGPT is a new chatbot released last week by OpenAI based on their
GPT-3.5 large language model.  (Stefania Druga referenced it in her
message about generative AI for kids.)  ChatGPT is astonishing.  It can
hold a conversation, write stories, write code in many different
computer languages, solve analogies, answer questions about hypothetical
situations, compose poetry, and more.  The world has been going nuts
over it, with over 1 million users signed up to play with it.

You have to try it and show it to your students.  Just follow this link:
https://chat.openai.com/chat

Here's a good New York Times article on the phenomenon:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/05/technology/chatgpt-ai-twitter.html

This critical article in the Atlantic advises to "Treat it like a toy,
not a tool."
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/chatgpt-openai-artificial-intelligence-writing-ethics/672386/

I think that's good advice.  While ChatGPT is very adept at holding a
conversation, a lot of what it says is utter nonsense.  Lots of people
have been pointing this out, but here are my own personal examples:

- It claimed that the isotopes of neon were radioactive and listed their
half lives.  In reality, the three major isotopes of neon are all stable
and have no half lives.  It just made up those numbers!

- When I asked it "Who is David Touretzky" it wrote a one-paragraph
biography of me that correctly identified me as a professor of computer
science at Carnegie Mellon, but the educational background and awards it
attributed to me were completely fictitious.

- It insisted that the cube root of -1 was i.  That's obviously wrong,
as i^3 = -i, not -1.  I tried to have an argument with it about this,
but I was unable to fully convince it that it was wrong.

- When I asked it to write Lisp code to generate all permutations of the
letters in the world JACKASS, it wrote code and showed me what the
output should look like, but when I actually ran the code it produced
garbage, not the desired result.

- It insisted that the LamDA language model was created by OpenAI, when
in reality it was created by Google.

Despite its limitations, you can have a lot of fun with ChatGPT.  I
asked it to compose a version of The Three Little Pigs where the
littlest pig was romantically involved with the wolf, and it did so.  It
wasn't a very good story, but the fact that it could do it at all is
astonishing.  We have not seen technology like this before.

The implications of this technology are hard to grasp at this point.
The dialog between humans and machines is about to get a lot more
interesting.

-- Dave