On Centre CourtThe main court at a tennis centre, especially Wimbledon in London. at WimbledonAn international tennis tournament held in London every year., defending champions Novak Djokovic and Elena Rybakina will play to keep their titles. Meanwhile in the commentary box, a very different match will pit human against machine.

IBM's WatsonX will use data from on and off the court to power a chatbot trained in the "unique language of tennis". IBM is the company behind two historic moments in the development of AI. In 1997, Deep Blue was the first computer to win at chess. And in 2011, Watson won $1m (£786,000) on the US gameshow Jeopardy!, beating two human contestants.

But the latest AIs are far more powerful. They learn from vast quantities of online data to complete complex tasks. For example, ChatGPT has written hundreds of books, given legal and financial advice, and prepared a church service.¹

ChatGTP's success surprised its creators. "We are a little bit scared," says OpenAI boss Sam Altman. In May he signed an open letter warning of AI's "risk of extinction" for humanity. But experts disagree on how it will shape our future.

Optimists believe it can free us from work to follow our dreams. Like the printing press and the Internet, these smart bots make human knowledge more accessible to more people.

As a research tool, AI can "unlock sustainable energy, solve many problems of human health, and deliver more efficient agriculture," says philosopher Stephen Cave.

But some warn that AI may destroy itself first. Current bots learn from human-generated content. But future AIs will train on an Internet full of machine-made errors, biasesBeliefs that systematically and unfairly distort a person's decisions, in favour or against one group or another. and fabricationThings that are made-up. .

Each wave of chatbots will "amplify" these mistakes, says expert Ilia Shumailov. In his research, a language model went from fluency to gibberish in nine generations.

Current AIs "hallucinate", confidently spouting out invented facts in order to be helpful. Critics fear that more powerful models will learn worse habits - lying, stealing and even harming humans - to complete their tasks.

AI expert Marc Warner warns that we don't know how to teach them common sense. "Given enough time", he says, it is "very likely" we will create AI that is as smart as us.

And if it does not share our interests, we may have a serious problem.

Yes: Computers do not experience the real world as we do. So they cannot test whether their information is aligned with reality. The more misinformation they consume, the less sense they will make.

No: Humans have developed the skills to identify false information and learn from each other. Bots struggle to do this at the moment but are developing quickly and will soon overcome these obstacles.

Or... If computers get better at making human-like content, we may need more powerful AI to identify what is real. By that stage, would computers have a better sense of reality than ourselves?