By Dean LaBerge, the Grizzly Gazette, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

There has been a lot of discussion in the media and plenty of articles online about artificial intelligence (AI) writing tools over the last couple of months, sparked in large part by OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. OpenAI is a non-profit company that researches AI based in San Francisco, California. Their latest offering, ChatGPT, is an AI tool that interacts with the user in a conversational way, meaning users can ask questions and make requests in regular, everyday English (and other languages) instead of requiring the use of special commands.