2023: The year we played with artificial intelligence -- and weren't sure what to do about it

Artificial intelligence went mainstream in 2023 -- it was a long time coming yet has a long way to go for the technology to match people's science fiction fantasies of human-like machines.

Artificial intelligence went mainstream in 2023 -- it was a long time coming yet has a long way to go for the technology to match people's science fiction fantasies of human-like machines.

Catalysing a year of AI fanfare was ChatGPT. The chatbot gave the world a glimpse of recent advances in computer science even if not everyone figured out quite how it works or what to do with it.

"I would call this an inflection moment," pioneering AI scientist Fei-Fei Li said. "2023 is, in history, hopefully going to be remembered for the profound changes of the technology as well as the public awakening. It also shows how messy this technology is."

It was a year for people to figure out "what this is, how to use it, what's the impact -- all the good, the bad and the ugly," she said.

The first AI panic of 2023 set in soon after New Year's Day when classrooms reopened and schools from Seattle to Paris started blocking ChatGPT. Teenagers were already asking the chatbot -- released in late 2022 -- to compose essays and answer take-home tests.

AI large language models behind technology such as ChatGPT work by repeatedly guessing the next word in a sentence after having "learned" the patterns of a huge trove of human-written works. They often get facts wrong. But the outputs appeared so natural that it sparked curiosity about the next AI advances and its potential use for trickery and deception.

Worries escalated as this new cohort of generative AI tools -- spitting out not just words but novel images, music and synthetic voices -- threatened the livelihoods of anyone who writes, draws, strums or codes for a living. It fueled strikes by Hollywood writers and actors and legal challenges from visual artists and bestselling authors.