I wrote this column myself, but how long before a chatbot could do it for me? | John Naughton

The impressive and wildly popular ChatGPT is the latest instalment in a long-running debate about whether we're creating machines to help us or replace us

Those who, like this columnist, spend too much time online will have noticed a kind of feeding frenzy over the past two weeks. The cause has been the release of an interesting chatbot - a software application capable of conducting an online conversation. The particular bot creating the fuss is ChatGPT, a prototype artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that focuses on usability and dialogue and was developed by OpenAI, an AI research laboratory based in San Francisco.

ChatGPT uses a large language model built via machine-learning methods and is based on OpenAI's GPT-3 model, which is capable of producing human-like text when given a prompt in natural language. It's an example of what has come to be called generative AI": software that uses machine-learning algorithms to enable machines to generate artificial content - text, images, audio and video content based on its training data - in a way that might persuade a human user into believing that its outputs are real".