ChatGPT

ChatGPT is a conversational AI service built by OpenAI. You type a question or a request into the chat window, and it writes back a response the way a person might. It's a bit like messaging a support agent who's on call around the clock, except the "agent" isn't a person — it's a program that has already read and learned from a huge amount of text.

Running this service actually requires a massive server operation. Behind the few seconds it takes for us to get an answer in the chat window, power-hungry, water-hungry data centers are computing nonstop. So lately, the impact these data centers have on local electricity rates and water supplies has become almost as much a talking point as ChatGPT's answer quality itself.

ChatGPT is used for all kinds of things — writing, coding, acting as a conversation partner — and because it's so general-purpose, it's increasingly taking over tasks that used to be done by people, like writing game dialogue or fiction. That's brought along copyright and disclosure controversies, with questions like "was this piece of writing, credited to a person, actually written by ChatGPT?"

A former lead writer on a game claimed that "Saber replaced me with ChatGPT," saying their dialogue work had been taken over by AI, which the company's CEO denied. Here, ChatGPT refers to a specific AI service by name, not a generic stand-in for AI as a whole. As with the phrase "services like Gemini" elsewhere in the article, ChatGPT shows up as just one of several competing services.

If you type a specific situation and the kind of result you want into ChatGPT's chat window, you can really feel the difference in answer quality.

Example: "Explain to my elementary-school nephew what a data center is and why it uses so much electricity, in 3 sentences."

It also helps to ask the same question twice while changing the conditions slightly, and compare how the answers differ — that's a good way to get a feel for how this service behaves.