You write something and it creates an answer that is statistically the most likely desired piece of text.
It is a text generation system.
When you ask it “write a poem” it will write a poem because the probability that you want a cake recipee is lower.
Then also imagine some people have requested something like
“will you kill us all?” and it answers with something.
When you see something funny it came up with it was “trained” on that by thousands of people who put answers into a “data storage” << I am trying to explain it for kids - (if anyone wants to play bullshit bingo do it somewhere else).
That means somewhere in the process of the creation of the model someone saw the question “will you kill us” and typed something like “no, of course not - lol - but can you give me the location of John Connor”.
The model can automatically create new sentences (some math involved for that) for example “No, I don’t want to kill you” - which is still more likely than a recipee for a cake or a poem.
Over time I assume that OpenAI has collected some data from a few chats the hundrets of millions of users had before. And I am absolutely sure that at least 50 million of them asked the same questions as you did. And they had conversations - the same way that you did. You know humans are not so different.
And the same method of “predicting what the correct answer might be” can be used in small talk.
You say something like “hey what’s up?” and when the answer starts with “Hey, I am …” you can predict that the rest of the sentence is more likely “fine” and not a recipee of a cake.
Would be pretty akward if you say “How are you?” and the answer is “based on my desire to tomato the flat cold see I saw that”
There are multiple combinations of that in the models - It is trained on large amounts of texts which allows it to find the next “word” for many types of questions, that is than curated by humans who type a couple answers and then there are mechanisms that can create answers with a combination of the next “word” and the style in which the curators wrote answers.