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In many ways, artificial intelligence has a bad reputation—much of which is deserved. I experienced it firsthand in 2023, when Cosmos magazine in Australia asked me to put an AI chatbot through its paces. The results were both unspectacular and frightening. The program could indeed write passable English—better than most of the students I’d taught in my days as a college instructor—but tended to write in clichés and broad strokes. When asked a technical question, one scientist noted that “it answered credibly, although with no rigorous details.” That was the unspectacular part. The frightening part was what happened when I