
The light and dark sides of AI have been in the public spotlight for many years. Think facial recognition, algorithms making loan and sentencing recommendations, and medical image analysis. But the impressive – and sometimes scary – capabilities of ChatGPT, DALL-E 2 and other conversational and image-conjuring artificial intelligence programs feel like a turning point.
The key change has been the emergence within the last year of powerful generative AI, software that not only learns from vast amounts of data but also produces things – convincingly written documents, engaging conversation, photorealistic images and clones of celebrity voices.