No Linux? No problem. Just get AI to hallucinate it for you
Enlarge / An AI-generated illustration of an AI-hallucinated computer. (credit: Benj Edwards / Ars Technica)
Over the weekend, experimenters discovered that OpenAI's new chatbot, ChatGPT, can hallucinate simulations of Linux shells and role-play dialing into a bulletin board system (BBS). The chatbot, based on a deep-learning AI model, uses its stored knowledge to simulate Linux with surprising results, including executing Python code and browsing virtual websites.
Last week, OpenAI made ChatGPT freely available during a testing phase, which has led to people probing its capabilities and weaknesses in novel ways.
On Saturday, a DeepMind research scientist named Jonas Degrave worked out how to instruct ChatGPT to act like a Linux shell by entering this prompt: