Reconsidering the chatbot that changed everything Illustration by The Atlantic December 1, 2023, 12:24 PM ET This is Atlantic Intelligence, an eight-week series in which The Atlantic’s leading thinkers on AI will help you understand the complexity and opportunities of this groundbreaking technology. (Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up here.) One year ago, ChatGPT was released into the world. The startlingly human-sounding chatbot kicked off the generative-AI revolution and quickly became one of the most successful internet applications ever—invading classrooms, workplaces, online stores, and more. The program has created billions of dollars of value where none existed before and enabled entire new skills and fields of work around coaxing useful responses from chatbots. But perhaps more important than any direct, material change, ChatGPT has sparked our imaginations, feeding many people’s hopes and fears about the rise of intelligent machines: boundless productivity, boundless information, boundless misinformation. “ChatGPT, the tool, is likely less important than ChatGPT, the cultural object,” Charlie Warzel wrote in a new piece for The Atlantic. OpenAI’s premier chatbot is bending how …