Artificial intelligence and the looming misinformation society

ChatGPT, a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool from OpenAI, has caused much amazement and apprehension. An exemplar of generative AI, ChatGPT combines powerful text generation capabilities and state-of-art conversational AI, to startling effect. This is made possible by advances in AI such as language processing, transformer neural networks, and reinforcement learning. ChatGPT has been trained on datasets that have about 500 billion words of text. For comparison, the English language Wikipedia, one of the sources on which it has been trained, totals about 4 billion words.