Chatbots as Tools or Existential Threats [President’s Message]

A few colleagues and I amused ourselves at a previous IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) with having ChatGPT try to handle all sorts of things, including a failed attempt at having it find Laypunov functions. ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence (AI) models have, in a remarkably short period of time, gone from vague curiosities to ever-present topics of conversation at faculty meetings, conference organizing committees, and op-ed pages. At that particular CDC-gathering, I was lamenting the fact that it was hard to think of enough topics to cover in the “President’s Message” column for the
IEEE Control Systems Magazine
. So why not have ChatGPT write the column?