Instead, what was most compelling was how easy it was to imagine them becoming more and more useful to more and more people. All these were groundbreaking at the start, but none of them changed anything overnight. The last time was the iPhone the others were probably Google search and the internet itself. Only a few times in my life have I experienced this creeping sense of possibility with a new technology. You find yourself reaching for it for big tasks and small, and though it fails often, it feels just helpful enough that you can imagine lots of people soon coming to depend on it.

Now you think of it differently - less as a dancing pony than as a workhorse. Soon, ChatGPT starts to etch a groove into your life. Over weeks and months you tinker with it, learn its capabilities and its deficiencies, imagine its possibilities for good and ill, its potential for ubiquity and for indispensability. What came first, the jock or the jockstrap?īut as the artificial intelligence chatbot easily dispatches your gimmes, you begin to take it more seriously. Tell me some vegetarian recipes with broccoli and peas. You begin with trivial, gimmicky prompts: Do this math problem. Once you start using ChatGPT you pretty much can’t stop.

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