The world's response to the oracular artificial intelligence program called ChatGPT started with chuckles but has quickly moved on to shivers, Axios' Scott Rosenberg reports.

What's happening: Trained on vast troves of online text, OpenAI's chatbot remixes those words into often-persuasive imitations of human expression and even style.

• In the days after OpenAI put ChatGPT out for free use, more than a million users began finding ways to have fun with it.

Yes, but: A growing chorus of experts believes it's too good at passing for human. Its capacity for generating endless quantities of authentic-seeming text, critics fear, will trigger a trust meltdown.

• A shakeup in the online information business, along with a likely flood of misinformation and spam, is just the start of the impact.

Why it matters: ChatGPT's ability to blur the line between human and machine authorship could wreak overnight havoc with norms across many disciplines, as people hand over the hard work of composing their thoughts to AI tools.

• High school and college instructors have long had to battle plagiarism and ghost-written term papers. But ChatGPT — and the likelihood that it will be followed by even more advanced AI — threatens to make this problem exponentially harder.

Education is where ChatGPT's disruption will land first, but any discipline or business built on foundations of text is in the blast radius.

• Think law, entertainment, science, history, media.
• The exact same set of concerns applies in the world of images, thanks to the parallel rise of image-generating AI programs.

What they're saying: "Shame on OpenAI for launching this pocket nuclear bomb without restrictions into an unprepared society," Paul Kedrosky, a venture investor and longtime internet analyst, wrote on Twitter earlier this month. "A virus has been released into the wild with no concern for the consequences."

The intrigue: AI companies, including OpenAI, are working on schemes that could watermark machine-generated texts.

• Venture capitalist Fred Wilson foresees the use of cryptographic signatures to verify a document's origins and history.
• For now, though, these remedies are just ideas, while ChatGPT is already up and running.

The big picture: The intense online debate over ChatGTP among technologists, investors and critics has surfaced a range of warnings over its failings.

Accuracy: ChatGTP's conversational fluency masks its inability to distinguish between fact and fiction.

• "It often looks like an undergraduate confidently answering a question for which it didn’t attend any lectures," as tech analyst Benedict Evans wrote.

Bias: OpenAI has tried to limit the potential for ChatGPT to say things that are blatantly offensive or discriminatory, but users have found many holes in its restraints. (That's likely what OpenAI wanted to happen in this public trial so it could improve the product.)

• Generative AIs like ChatGPT learn from the patterns of the texts they ingest, and the corpus of human expression is full of humanity's failings.
• It's on AI-makers' shoulders to scrub the data they feed their algorithms and limit potential harms to society, but much of the industry has chosen haste and risk over caution.

The other side: With thoughtful deployment, ChatGPT-like tools could end up freeing us from drudgery without undermining genuine learning.

• AI could help students with writing the way calculators help them with math, as sociologist and New York Times columnist Zeynep Tufekci suggests.

Our thought bubble: Writing is hard! The more writing AI does for us, the fewer of us will practice the skill.

• That could set off a downward spiral in our collective capacity to expand knowledge, with a dwindling supply of new human creations available to train the next AI.
• Worst case: Humanity gets stuck in an AI-plowed rut.

A majority of respondents to a Twitter poll posted by Elon Musk on Sunday said that he should "step down as head" of Twitter, Axios' Sara Fischer and Dan Primack report.

Why it matters: Musk's potential resignation could end one of the most chaotic and controversial tenures ever for a CEO of a major U.S. company.

Details: The poll, which launched Sunday at 6:20pm ET, concluded with 57.5% of the more than 17.5 million respondents saying Musk should step down.

• Musk took the poll from his personal account, with a fan-heavy following of millions.

Yes, but: Musk still owns Twitter, so any new CEO would still report to him — and any effort to stabilize the company could be disrupted by his tweets.

Between the lines: Musk has long dismissed the value of corporate titles, and had recently assured anxious Tesla investors that he planned to step down eventually.

• "The question is not finding a CEO, the question is finding a CEO who can keep Twitter alive," Musk tweeted Sunday.

Musk's poll followed a rollercoaster weekend during which Twitter instituted a fresh series of account bans and new content rules barring some accounts and links that pointed to rival services, including Facebook and Mastodon.

• But after a day full of confusion and outcry, by late Sunday night the new policy and tweets announcing it abruptly vanished from the site.

Critics and the stock market have looked harshly on the billions that Meta has been pouring into virtual reality and the metaverse. But CTO Andrew Bosworth defends the investment.

The big picture: Bosworth told Axios that Meta is putting what amounts to about 20% of its resources into these long-term projects, with the remainder still supporting core businesses like Facebook and Instagram.

• "It's pretty reasonable for a company of our size and in our industry," he said.

Bosworth hailed the progress Meta is making in VR, especially with this year's Meta Quest Pro headset.

• But he also acknowledged that a slowdown in Meta's core business as the advertising market cools will limit how much the company spends in VR and other areas. "Our investments are responding to the business conditions," he said.

In a year-end post, Bosworth also confirmed that Meta will introduce the successor to its Quest 2 VR headset next year, but declined in the interview to offer further details, such as whether it will support color mixed reality — an advance from the Quest Pro that he described as a key breakthrough.

• Bosworth said it was less clear when the company would release a successor to this year's high-end Meta Quest Pro, noting that the company has many ongoing hardware projects but that not all of them will get the green light, especially in a tougher economy.
• The sagging economy will also delay other needed breakthroughs in VR, he said, as other companies also slow their development work.

The other side: Bosworth's comments contrast with the harsh words delivered by former Oculus chief technology officer John Carmack in a post Friday announcing his exit as an adviser to Meta.

• "We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort," Carmack wrote. "There is no way to sugar coat this; I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy."

On Tap

• It's a quiet week on the tech calendar, at least on paper.

ICYMI

• Germany's 5G network relies even more heavily on gear from China's Huawei than did the country's 4G cellular network. (Reuters)

This was the sound in Buenos Aires after Argentina scored one of its World Cup goals on Sunday. And this is what it looked like by drone later.