“That seemed like magic to me,” Pietro Schirano says. “Since it was so brilliant, it scared me a little.”

He’s discussing the most recent version of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) platform.

You enter something in, and it generates a response for you.

It’s strange how human, friendly, and intelligent the replies appear to be.

GPT-4 is an AI model that sits below it.

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Mr. Schirano, design lead at business financial company Brex, has been creating computer programs with ChatGPT.

“I want to make a Pong-like game,” he said, about Atari’s 1970s table tennis game.

“What is the ideal language to [use] so that a large number of people can test it?”

ChatGPT not only suggested a web programming language (JavaScript) but also generated code for a basic version of the game.

What an experienced developer would have taken half an hour to write took ChatGPT 40 seconds.

It was similarly effective for the popular arcade games Breakout and Asteroids.

Pong is pictured here being played at a trade show in Cologne in 2019. ChatGPT immediately developed a basic version of the game.

On August 21, 2019, visitors play the classic game “Pong” during the Gamescom trade show in Cologne, western Germany.

There are countless code examples for these games offered online, but ChatGPT is not looking for a ready-made remedy.

While being created with massive amounts of web content, ChatGPT produces new text for you by predicting the correct answer.

“ChatGPT understood my question about how I might make this game more popular,” Mr. Schirano says.

“It has a lot of contextual awareness that someone who has never developed wouldn’t be able to obtain from Google.”

You’d have to use a search engine to figure out which coding language to use, how to use it, and how to complete any missing examples available.

ChatGPT could provide you with all of the game codes as well as guidelines suited to your specific needs.

“Today, even someone with no knowledge of what they’re doing can make a simple web app,” Mr. Schirano said.

Others say that because there are so many examples online, recreating these classic games was too simple.

Then Mr. Schirano’s colleague, the design manager at Brex Ammaar Reshi, pushed ChatGPT even further.

He requested it to rebuild an old PC game for which no example code is available on the internet.

Skyroads is a 3D game in which you direct a car onto a path while hopping over objects.

ChatGPT heard about the game through its Wikipedia page, and Mr. Reshi explained how it worked.

“There was a lot of back and forth with this one,” Mr. Reshi says.

“Maybe an hour of adjusting this and changing that.”

He had to test the game, tell ChatGPT how to change the game’s behavior, and then do it all over again.

Considering this, Mr. Reshi was able to create an online 3D game despite without knowing any of the JavaScript languages or having access to code examples for that game.