Almost immediately, educators began experimenting with the tool. While the bot's answers to academic questions weren't perfect, they were awfully close to what teachers would expect from many of their students. How long, educators wonder, will it be before students begin using the site to write essays or computer code for them?

The tool was created by OpenAI, an artificial intelligence laboratory launched several years ago with funding from Elon Musk and others. The bot is powered by a "large language model," AI software that is trained to predict the next word in a sentence by analyzing massive amounts of internet text and finding patterns by trial and error. ChatGPT was also refined by humans to make its answers more conversational, and many have noted its ability to produce paragraphs that are often humorous or even philosophical.