Learning goal
On 30 November 2022, OpenAI, an American artificial intelligence research company, introduced ChatGPT, which quickly became the world’s best-known generative artificial intelligence (AI) application. Trying it out required only a simple registration, and the service’s popularity grew at an unprecedented pace: it reached one million users in just five days.
Questions asked in users’ own languages received fast and surprisingly relevant answers, as if the “conversation” were taking place not with a machine, but with another human being.
In this learning material, we trace the historical origins of the term “artificial intelligence” and examine how early media hype contributed to the emergence of misconceptions that persist to this day, such as the idea that if a machine responds in a human-like way, it must also think in a human-like way.
The learning material encourages educators to use these tools critically and responsibly in their pedagogical work, while being aware of both their possibilities and their limitations.
