Like many other people over the past week, Bindu Reddy recently fell under the spell of ChatGPT, a free chatbot that can answer all manner of questions with stunning and unprecedented eloquence. Reddy, CEO of Abacus.AI, which develops tools for coders who use artificial intelligence, was charmed by ChatGPT's ability to answer requests for definitions of love or creative new cocktail recipes. Her company is already exploring how to use ChatGPT to help write technical documents. "We have tested it, and it works great," she says. ChatGPT, created by startup OpenAI, has become the darling of the internet since its release last week.

Like most other people, I have been highly intrigued by the recent usability and results of deep neural networks, especially in the genre of text generators. Which are applications that automatically writes text and lets you have a conversation with it. To most people, it looks like sincere conversations with a strangely intelligent entity that somehow responds even though it isn't human. It has that odd type of interesting to it, where it's almost a bit scary. The field of text generators is usually referred to as Natural-Language Generators (NLGs), and the use cases range from combining simple observations into reports or news (e.g. the Pollen Forecast for Scotland system) to predicting your next typed word on your phone and even writing complete research papers.

The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild is a surprising video game. Surprising because it builds off of modern game design sensibilities while at the same time subverting those sensibilities, turning them on their proverbial heads. Now we have no choice. We're forced to look at open-world video games differently now, through a new lens. Game designers should study the game carefully as well.

Of course, no discussion of 2015 science fiction movies would be complete without mention of this year's modest little endeavor from Disney/Lucasarts: On the meta level, the film doesn't have much direct conjecture on contemporary technology -- everything happened a long time ago, after all, in a galaxy far, far away. Plus, "Star Wars" has always been more about space fantasy than hard sci-fi, anyway. But those interested in the "soft sciences" of sociology and anthropology will find plenty to chew on. The movie is basically a masterclass on how mythology works -- how we tell ourselves the same story, over and over, in different times and places. The year's second-tier sci-fi films had some lessons to impart as well.

I should have known it'd be you, Teddy Roosevelt. I was keeping to myself, peaceably prepping rockets for Mars, and then your armada showed up. After all the gifts I sent! When you're swatting Yankee field cannons and battering rams with rockets and fighter jets, what's to complain about? I remember when we obsessed over absurdities like this in the Civilization games.