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Artificial Intelligence

ChatGPT, the massively popular conversational chatbot, is back up and running after going down for a short time Thursday.

Downdetector, a website that tracks online service disruptions, registered a sharp spike in outage reports for ChatGPT on Thursday morning.

Attempts to open the artificial intelligence tool developed by OpenAI on Thursday morning briefly resulted in a lengthy attempt to load the webpage, followed by “bad gateway” error message.

OpenAI which said in a status update that it had been investigating “increased errors for ChatGPT,” said at 8:43 a.m. that the cause of the issue was identified. The chatbot now appears to be working again.

The two-year-old chatbot developed by OpenAI is used by hundreds of millions of people each week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said last year.

USA TODAY left a message Thursday morning with OpenAI seeking comment.

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What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed and launched in 2022 by OpenAI.

As opposed to predictive AI, generative AI is trained on large amounts of data in order to identify patterns and create content of its own, including voices, music, pictures and videos.

ChatGPT allows users to interact with the chatting tool much like they could with another human, with the chatbot generating conversational responses to questions or prompts.

Proponents say ChatGPT could reinvent online search engines and could assist with research, information writing, content creation and customer service chatbots. However, the service has at times become controversial, with some critics raising concerns that ChatGPT and similar programs fuel online misinformation and enable students to plagiarize.

This article has been updated to add new information.

Eric Lagatta covers breaking and trending news for USA TODAY. Reach him at [email protected]