When researchers study some animals in the wild, it usually means a human has to get close to them to collect information. However, people make animals nervous. When human researchers are around, animals don’t act as usual.

A team of researchers from France wanted to find a way to study penguins (企鹅) without changing their natural behavior. They did an experiment.

First, they put some small monitors (监测仪) on a group of penguins. These monitors could record how fast their hearts beat. They found when a penguin felt nervous, its heart beat faster. Then they sent a small, remote-controlled (遥控的) robot to the penguins. The robot could read information from the monitors and send it back to the researchers. When the robot got close to the penguins, some of them felt nervous and tried to run away. However, the researchers found that the penguins’ hearts didn’t beat as fast as they did when a human got close to them. The feeling of being nervous also went away more quickly.

Finally, the researchers gave the robot black arms and a black and white face. When they sent it back to the penguins, they did not run away from it. Some of the penguins even treated it as if it were a real baby penguin.

With the help of this robot, now researchers are able to collect information about penguins without changing the way they behave. What’s more, they are able to collect five times more information than they did in the past.

Developed by US company OpenAI, ChatGPT has taken the internet by storm, winning 100 million users since it came out in November 2022. People can ask the robot to write stories and emails, create instructions for cooking a certain food, translate languages, and answer all kinds of questions. In its own words, it is “a language model trained in a large amount of internet text to help users get human-like text.”

Compared with Siri or other chatbots, ChatGPT uses a much bigger information center for training. It also uses stronger software (软件) and hardware to learn things by itself. For example, if it provides a wrong answer to your question, you can tell it the right one and it will correct itself. “It’s a totally different chatbot,” computer scientist Liu Xiaoguang from Nankai University told Tianjin Daily. “The knowledge level ChatGPT shows is the same as a university student. That’s why it shocked the world.”

But one big problem with ChatGPT is that it makes mistakes or even gives false information. When Rezza, a 28-year-old from Indonesia, used the robot to write an essay (论文), it “gave out many examples which other writers actually hadn’t mentioned at all”, he told The Guardian. Since the robot is trained using words from the internet, it can also pick up biases (偏见) about certain groups. These are all things that need to be dealt with.