I told ChatGPT I enjoyed the 2013 film "Her," whose protagonist develops a relationship with a virtual assistant. It spewed out a list of sci-fi titles like "Blade Runner 2049" and "Ex Machina." "These movies," it typed, "explore the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence, touching on themes such as consciousness, identity and the nature of existence." Wei Xu, an interactive computing professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, explained how ChatGPT managed to produce a list of legitimately comparable movies in seconds. The software, she said, is trained to spot patterns within a massive amount of text data--over 500 GBs--it scrapes off the internet.

MORE OFTEN than I like, after scanning the endless carousels on streaming apps, I find myself re-watching "Seinfeld." I attribute this to a combo of laziness and mediocre recommendation engines, which rarely highlight anything I actually want to watch. It's a problem that seemed custom-designed for ChatGPT, the bot made by Microsoft-backed artificial intelligence research firm, OpenAI. Over 100 million people have tried ChatGPT since its launch in November, posing it tasks as disparate as writing English essays and negotiating down internet bills. By comparison, "What movie should I watch?" seemed simple.