Log on a breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

In 1950, British mathematician, computer scientist and codebreaker Alan Turing created a test

to determine if machines could think.

Computer and a human being would send written responses to a human interrogator.

If the responses from the computer were indistinguishable from the responses of a real person, Turing

argued that that machine should be considered intelligent.

Well, 73 years later, software company OpenAI has come closer than anyone else in history

to passing Turing's test.

Chat-generative pre-trained transformer, or chat-GPT for short, is a groundbreaking language

software that responds to nearly any prompt with a coherent, well-reasoned response.

Almost indistinguishable from what a human could produce.

Chat-GPT is to borrow a phrase now breaking the internet, and so far what it's produced

ranges from the impressive to the hilarious.

It's also forcing a series of existential crises.

For example, teachers are scrambling to discern the works of their student from the work

of compelling AI counterfeits.

The tech industry now faces what the New York Times has called an AI arms race, as competitors

like Google apply their own AI technology to search engines and ad generators, searching

for errors in codes sifting through mountains of data, summarizing complex issues in a few

paragraphs.

These things have all been made exponentially easier and more user-friendly by the technology.

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