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It was almost two years ago at a Christmas Eve party in 2022. I'm not the antisocial type, but I found myself looking for a breather from friendly chatter with the people I had just met, nice and welcoming as they were. My thumb was flicking through world events in that desensitized scan so many of us experience. 'Honey, I'll be back; I'm going for an evening scroll...'

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That's when some article mentioning ChatGPT and the concept of a large language model caused my eyes to widen. The little man that lives behind my retinas, his day job working the refrigerator when its door shuts, scurried to grab his padded mallet, and hit the rusted tin thing that happens to be my gong-like brain. 'Hey dummy! Yeah, you, pay attention to this!”

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I obeyed. My first thought was that a new party trick had just been invented. I can't remember one word of the article other than it interested me enough to travel on my phone over to the OpenAI website, and all too easily find the deceptively simple interface that is ChatGPT. The single gong that went off in my head turned into an all-brass marching band circling a rabbit hole in a communal teeter, then fell completely in.

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