Why? Natural language interaction with computers is like the holy grail of human-computer interaction, of course they jumped on it.
As someone in the field, trust me when I say there's going to be a big wave of HCI research that will pretty much just be "What can we glue ChatGPT to?"
Seems to be every technical field, both academic and industry…
they are chasing that research funding money
Sadly I think this is a significant part of it. It is so very hard to convince anyone in CS to fund unsexy projects. I think the majority of innovation on the unsexy things happens internally at the large tech companies.
Or maybe their chasing it because it's a highly relevant topic that might impact lots of people around the world, you know, a kind of human-computer interaction.
Just the response I would expect from an academic.
Just the response I would expect from an academic. Universities are charity-businesses with an educational interest.
Perhaps they could learn something about HCI from ChatGPT...?