ChatGPT, in full Chat Generative Pre-training Transformer, software that allows a user to ask it questions using conversational, or natural, language. It was released on November 30, 2022, by the American company OpenAI and almost immediately disturbed academics, journalists, and others because of concern that it was impossible to distinguish human- from ChatGPT-generated writing. Language models produce text based on the probability for a word to occur based on previous words in the sequence. By being trained on about 45 terabytes of text from the Internet, the GPT-3 language model used by ChatGPT calculates that some sequences of words are