An old-school English teacher encounters ChatGPT

Several weeks ago the artificial intelligence company OpenAI released ChatGPT, a language model software that aspires to the Holy Grail of interaction between humans and their computers: the ability to have a “conversation.” Henceforth I’ll stop putting quotation marks around words like conversation and think and remember. These are things that humans do, and we should keep in mind that we’re still talking about a machine. Nevertheless, for this column I’ll dispense with the judgment implied by quotation marks around a word such as “learn” when it’s applied to a computer. If you experiment a b...