It has taken a very short time for artificial intelligence application ChatGPT to have a disruptive effect on journalism. A technology columnist for the New York Times wrote that a chatbot expressed feelings (which is impossible). Other media outlets filled with examples of “Sydney” the Microsoft-owned Bing AI search experiment being “rude” and “bullying” (also impossible). Ben Thompson, who writes the Stratechery newsletter, declared that Sydney had provided him with the “most mind-blowing computer experience of my life” and he deduced that the AI was trained to elicit emotional reactions – and it seemed to have succeeded.

To be clear, it is not possible for AI such as ChatGPT and Sydney to have emotions. Nor can they tell whether they are making sense or not. What these systems are incredibly good at is emulating human prose, and predicting the “correct” words to string together. These “large language models” of AI applications, such as ChatGPT, can do this because they have been fed billions of articles and datasets published on the internet. They can then generate answers to questions.