ChatGPT doesn't come with an instruction manual. Only a quarter of Americans who have heard of the AI chatbot say they have used it, Pew Research Center reported this week. "The hardest lesson" for new AI chatbot users to learn, says Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor and chatbot enthusiast, "is that they're really difficult to use." Or at least, to use well. The Washington Post talked with Mollick and other experts about how to get the most out of AI chatbots -- from OpenAI's ChatGPT to Google's Bard and Microsoft's Bing -- and how to avoid common pitfalls.

I do a lot of experiments with various AI systems (mostly Bing in the last couple weeks - here is my guide), and I often find myself astonished. I know that Large Language Models like Bing and ChatGPT are basically word prediction engines, but they are capable of startling results that go beyond what I might have expected from that knowledge. Indeed, the most astonishing feats of AI seem to rely on their ability to be creative through "hallucination." This tendency of AI to make up facts is troubling in some cases, but it also allows them to provide unique and original replies by connecting unlikely sources of inspiration and finding surprising linkages. I wanted to compile some examples that came out of my experiments, some of which have been on my Twitter feed, and some of which are new.