Interview with the Chatbot: How Does It Reason?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Chatbots that can generate answers to a variety of questions and engage in conversation have become widely available to the public. The potential use and misuse of these systems in education are currently the subject of great debate. These discussions can be more productive if they are informed by a better understanding of the scope and limitations of these tools. This commentary seeks to provide some insights into how AI Chatbots seem to reason about chemical entities and processes, analyzing the extent to which these systems express misconceptions, explanatory biases, and limited or flawed explanations. This analysis reveals fascinating similarities between the answers generated by AI Chatbots and chemistry learners when engaged in an explanatory activity.