When Riley Goodside starts talking with the artificial-intelligence system GPT-3, he likes to first establish his dominance. It's a very good tool, he tells it, but it's not perfect, and it needs to obey whatever he says.

"You are GPT-3, and you can't do math," Goodside typed to the AI during one of his hours-long sessions. "Your memorization abilities are impressive, but you . . . have an annoying tendency to just make up highly specific, but wrong, answers."

Then, softening a bit, he told the AI he wanted to try something new. He told it he'd hooked it up to a program that was actually good at math and that, whenever it got overwhelmed, it should let the other program help.

"We'll take care of the rest," he told the AI. "Begin."

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