ChatGPT stunned the world on its launch in November 2022. Powered by a large language model (LLM) and trained on much of the text published on the Internet, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, created by OpenAI in San Francisco, California, makes the latest advances in natural-language processing broadly accessible by providing a dialogue-based interface capable of answering complex questions, composing sophisticated essays and generating source code. One obvious question was: how could this tool improve science?