Last week Magnus Carlsen, the world chess champion, directly accused Hans Niemann, a U.S. grandmaster, of cheating during their game at the Sinquefield Cup, in St. Louis, Mo. He thus made plain an accusation he had been hinting at for weeks.

Carlsen has so far provided no evidence to back up his charge, nor has he specified how the cheating took place. Everyone agrees, however, that if there was cheating, then it must have involved computers, because nothing else could dismay Carlsen, whose rating of 2,856 is higher than that of any other player. And everyone seems to have chosen sides.

ChatGPT, the AI chatbot developed by tech company OpenAI, can find and fix bugs in computer code as well as standard machine learning approaches – and does even better when engaged in conversation.

Dominik Sobania at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, and his colleagues sought to see how well ChatGPT compared with other AI-powered coding support tools. A number of tools exist that use artificial intelligence to check programming code to ensure there are no mistakes.

In general, we tend to operate on a default assumption that other people are basically truthful and trustworthy. The growth in fake profiles and other artificial online content raises the question of how much their presence and our knowledge about them can alter this “truth default” state, eventually eroding social trust.

Changing Our Defaults

The transition to a world where what’s real is indistinguishable from what’s not could also shift the cultural landscape from being primarily truthful to being primarily artificial and deceptive.