What is AI? What is ChatGPT?

My name is Kentaro Toyama. I'm a faculty member at the School of Information at the University of Michigan, and I do research about digital technology and its impact on society. Overall, Artificial Intelligence is really any kind of system that is human created, that does things that we as human beings perceive to be intelligent. In this broadest sense it could be everything from the intelligent AI in your garage door opener that make sure that the door doesn't accidentally shut on something. And of course, these days we're all carrying very intelligent things in our pockets, our smartphones can understand our speech to a great extent, and respond and intelligent manner. All of that is artificial intelligence. But recently, there's been a lot of excitement around a particular class of artificial intelligence that is really about effectively a certain kind of very sophisticated kind of statistical pattern recognition and learning about patterns and generating new patterns and so forth. And that class, which is sometimes called neural networks or machine learning or deep learning is really what's generating the recent excitement around AI. ChatGPT is one of the most recent technologies that have come out of this wave of AI. And what it is is, it's informally called a chatbot, meaning that you can have a conversation with it through a text interface just like you were texting a friend. And what's amazing about ChatGPT is the degree to which its responses are so human in nature. In fact, unless you're really looking for flaws in ChatGPT, you can have a text based conversation with it that just seems like you're talking to another adult human being.