It is a robot researcher with good communication skills; you can ask it to answer questions about various areas of knowledge and it will write short documents in various formats and in excellent English. Or write bad poetry, incomprehensible jokes, and obey a command like "Write Tetris in C." What comes out looks like it could be, too. Coders love that sort of thing, and have been stuffing Stack Overflow's dev query boards with generated snippets. Just one problem – the quality of the code is bad. So bad, Stack Overflow has screamed "STOP!" and is mulling general guidelines to stop it happening again.

In my previous NextGov column, I reviewed the new ChatGPT artificial intelligence, asking it to perform tasks as varied as programming in C to telling me a bedtime story. I even interviewed the AI about why some people are afraid of artificial intelligences and the importance of ethics as the science of AI moves forward. I found that the ChatGPT AI from OpenAI was extremely adept at fielding just about any kind of question I could throw at it. Even though it's not connected to the internet or any live data streams--so you can't ask it about current events after 2021--it generally provided much better and more detailed information than you would ever find in something like a Google search. The AI is currently free to use, so everyone should give it a try.