Glossary
Chatbot
A program that holds a text or voice conversation with users, now usually powered by a large language model.
A chatbot is software that converses with people. Older chatbots followed scripts and fixed menus. Most current ones are built on large language models, which let them respond to open-ended questions in natural language.
Chatbots are the most common way the public uses generative AI, through consumer apps, customer service, and government or company websites. Their answers can be wrong, out of date, or inconsistent, and some lawsuits and regulations focus on how they respond to vulnerable users such as minors.
A chatbot built into a website may use one company's model while being run and configured by another organization. Responsibility for its answers can be shared or disputed.
See also
In our coverage
- GSA's AI contract clause takes effect, barring vendors from training models on government data
- Eight US states sue OpenAI, alleging ChatGPT harms children and misleads users about safety
- Google's AMIE chatbot interviewed 98 urgent-care patients under supervision in a Lancet feasibility study
- University trial finds students offered a GPT-4o study assistant got lower grades, in unreviewed paper
- White House launches America.gov, an AI chatbot portal drawing on 29,000 federal websites
- Nature study turns research papers into AI agents that answer questions about their methods
- AI and jobs: how to read the numbers
- AI in government: the questions to ask about public-sector systems