So far, newsrooms have pursued two very different approaches to integrating the buzziest new AI tool, ChatGPT, into their work. Tech news site CNET secretly started using ChatGPT to write entire articles, only for the experiment to go up in flames. It ultimately had to issue corrections amid accusations of plagiarism. Buzzfeed, on the other hand, has taken a more careful, measured approach. Its leaders want to use ChatGPT to generate quiz answers, guided by journalists who create the topics and questions.

Microsoft on Monday said it had extended its partnership with OpenAI, the research lab and creator of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot that has sparked widespread fears of cheating in schools and universities. In a company blog post tweeted by CEO Satya Nadella, the tech giant announced a "multiyear, multibillion dollar investment to accelerate AI breakthroughs" that would be "broadly shared with the world." OpenAI's ChatGPT became an internet sensation when it was released without warning in November, allowing users to experiment with its ability to write essays, articles and poems as well as computer code in just seconds. With teachers alarmed by its ability, ChatGPT is banned in universities and school districts - including in New York City and Washington DC - and has sparked nervous debates about the future of office work. California-based OpenAI is also the creator of DALL-E, a program that can swiftly draw up digital images and illustrations at a simple request.

On January 18, Time magazine published revelations that alarmed if not necessarily surprised many who work in Artificial Intelligence. The news concerned ChatGPT, an advanced AI chatbot that is both hailed as one of the most intelligent AI systems built to date and feared as a new frontier in potential plagiarism and the erosion of craft in writing. Many had wondered how ChatGPT, which stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, had improved upon earlier versions of this technology that would quickly descend into hate speech. The answer came in the Time magazine piece: dozens of Kenyan workers were paid less than $2 per hour to process an endless amount of violent and hateful content in order to make a system primarily marketed to Western users safer. It should be clear to anyone paying attention that our current paradigm of digitalisation has a labour problem. We have and are pivoting away from the ideal of an open internet built around communities of shared interests to one that is dominated by the commercial prerogatives of a handful of companies located in specific geographies.

Tel-Aviv-based AI21 Labs launched today Wordtune Spices, a writer-augmentation tool based on generative AI. Selecting from 12 different cues, writers can generate a range of textual options to add to and enhance sentences. Spices can also suggest statistics to strengthen an argument or sharpen a detail. AI21 says Spices is not intended to replace writers but to function as a writing assistant, suggesting additional complete sentences that improve and enhance the text that is being written. It could help refine and enrich the main message of the text, bolster and enrich arguments, and add creative expressions such as a joke or inspirational quote. The Israeli startup claims to have solved one of the major issues with popular applications based on Large Language Models (LLMs) such as OpenAI's ChatGPT which do not give source credit.

This week, Terwiesch released a research paper in which he documented how ChatGPT performed on the final exam of a typical MBA core course, Operations Management. The A.I. chatbot, he wrote, "does an amazing job at basic operations management and process analysis questions including those that are based on case studies." It did have shortcomings, he noted, including being able to handle "more advanced process analysis questions." But ChatGPT, he determined, "would have received a B to B- grade on the exam." Elsewhere, it has also "performed well in the preparation of legal documents and some believe that the next generation of this technology might even be able to pass the bar exam," he noted.

Faculty from the Stanford Accelerator for Learning are already thinking about the ways in which ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence will change and contribute to education in particular. Victor Lee, associate professor of education and the faculty lead for the accelerator initiative on generative AI in education, stresses the importance of educators in harnessing this technology. "If we want generative AI to meaningfully improve education," he says, "there is the obvious step we need to take of listening to the existing expertise in education -- from educators, parents, students, and scholars who have spent years studying education -- and using what we learn to find the most pertinent and valuable use cases for generative AI in a very complicated educational system." Over the next several weeks, the Stanford Accelerator for Learning will launch listening sessions and gatherings with educators to strategize a path for generative AI. Says Lee, "We need the use of this technology to be ethical, equitable, and accountable."

Artificial intelligence has in recent years proved itself to be a quick study, although it is being educated in a manner that would shame the most brutal headmaster. Locked into airtight Borgesian libraries for months with no bathroom breaks or sleep, AIs are told not to emerge until they've finished a self-paced speed course in human culture. On the syllabus: a decent fraction of all the surviving text that we have ever produced. When AIs surface from these epic study sessions, they possess astonishing new abilities. People with the most linguistically supple minds--hyperpolyglots--can reliably flip back and forth between a dozen languages; AIs can now translate between more than 100 in real time.

While grading essays for his world religions course last month, Antony Aumann, a professor of philosophy at Northern Michigan University, read what he said was easily "the best paper in the class." It explored the morality of burqa bans with clean paragraphs, fitting examples and rigorous arguments. A red flag instantly went up. Aumann confronted his student over whether he had written the essay himself. The student confessed to using ChatGPT, a chatbot that delivers information, explains concepts and generates ideas in simple sentences -- and, in this case, had written the paper.

The recent launches of two large language models, ChatGPT and Galactica, have led to much interest and controversy amongst the AI community, and beyond. These models, and in particular their potential use for writing scientific articles (and essays), provided the inspiration for this month's discussion. Joining the discussion this time are: Sabine Hauert (University of Bristol), Sarit Kraus (Bar-Ilan University), Michael Littman (Brown University), and Lucy Smith (AIhub). Sabine Hauert: Has anyone had a chance to use any of these new models yet? Sarit Kraus: During the summer I played with the previous version of GPT. Have you tried the latest version, Michael?

Feature As word of students using AI to automatically complete essays continues to spread, some lecturers are beginning to rethink how they should teach their pupils to write. Writing is a difficult task to do well. The best novelists and poets write furiously, dedicating their lives to mastering their craft. The creative process of stringing together words to communicate thoughts is often viewed as something complex, mysterious, and unmistakably human. No wonder people are fascinated by machines that can write too.