When OpenAI, a company founded by Microsoft pioneer Bill Gates, unveiled ChatGPT in November 2022, it marked the biggest advance in artificial intelligence (AI) in years. The revolutionary new tool can take questions from users and produce human-like responses. ChatGPT and similar chatbots developed soon after can produce coherent essays, compose music, answer test questions-and perhaps even think. "Until now, artificial intelligence could read and write, but could not understand the content," Gates said. "This will change the world." But will it change it for the better? Supporters argue that ChatGPT will help individuals and organizations review massive amounts of information, draft top-quality reports, and perform many valuable functions, such as writing and developing computer programs. It will free humans to do more high-level tasks, they contend, and create new jobs in the process. But critics caution that ChatGPT poses a serious danger to people's privacy and threatens to undermine many basic norms of society. It could eliminate jobs, they contend, spur the spread of disinformation, and ultimately reduce humans' capacity for reason and writing. Will ChatGPT do more harm than good?

Originally released by Intelligence Squared US, 2023. Streaming video file encoded with permission for digital streaming by Infobase on May 24, 2023.