After years of research, it appears that artificial intelligence (AI) is reaching a sort of tipping point, capturing the imaginations of everyone from students saving time on their essay writing to leaders at the world's largest tech companies. Excitement is building around the possibilities that AI tools unlock, but what exactly these tools are capable of and how they work is still not widely understood. We could write about this in detail, but given how advanced tools like ChatGPT have become, it only seems right to see what generative AI has to say about itself. Everything in the infographic above – from illustrations and icons to the text descriptions --was created using generative AI tools such as Midjourney. Everything that follows in this article was generated using ChatGPT based on specific prompts.

So, let's see what you can do with it, shall we? Rather than give you a description of our own, we thought, given the nature of this article, to let ChatGPT answer for itself. "I am a language model developed by OpenAI. I was trained on a diverse range of internet text, including websites, books, and more. This allows me to generate human-like text responses to a wide range of questions and prompts," ChatGPT explains. "My training data encompasses a wide range of topics, so I can converse on many subjects, including but not limited to science, history, mathematics, and current events. However, I am still just a machine, and while I can generate responses that are similar to what a human might say, I do not have thoughts, feelings, or consciousness," it adds.

On Thursday, February 2 at 19:30 GMT: Generative AI is the latest wave in artificial intelligence technology that has captured the imagination of citizens, technologists and investors alike. The technology, which can generate new content in response to brief prompts, is being touted for its potential to revolutionise how humans interact with computers. Developed with machine learning, generative AI tools are exposed to large data sets and trained to create novel material based on the information they consume. The applications to daily life range from streamlining the process of coding or developing architectural designs to how we use search engines or even write essays. While some may fear generative AI will replace jobs, others see the technology as a way to relieve some workers of tedious tasks.

Social media company and Snapchat maker Snap has for years defined itself as a "camera company," despite its failures to turn its photo-and-video recording glasses known as Spectacles into a mass-market product and, more recently, its decision to kill off its camera-equipped drone. But that hasn't stopped the company from envisioning a future where AR glasses are a commonly used device, and one, as the company revealed on Tuesday's fourth-quarter earnings call, that will eventually be powered by AI technology. Investors wanted to get a sense of how Snap was thinking about the latest developments in AI -- particularly in buzzy areas like generative AI. which has benefited from advances in algorithms, language models and the increased processing power available to run the necessary calculations. One pointed to the AI image generator Midjourney's bot for Discord as an example of how AI could lead to increased user engagement within an app. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel agreed that, in the near term, there were a lot of opportunities to use generative AI to make Snap's camera more powerful.

Investigating the first half of this claim, the authors present several qualitative comparisons between Imagen and DALL-E 2 generated images. They also provide results from human evaluation experiments where people were asked to choose the most photorealistic image from a single text prompt or caption. Even before considering any results, immediately the authors have introduced a degree of subjectivity into their analysis that is inherent in human evaluation experiments. Therefore the results shown in [1] must be considered with care and a healthy level of skepticism. To provide some context to these results, the authors select some example comparisons shown to human raters and include these in the Appendix (definitely take a look at these -- for motivation, I've added an example from DALL-E 2 above). However, even with these examples, I find it difficult to make a clear judgement over which image should be preferred. Considering the copied examples shown in the figure above, personally I believe that some of DALL-E 2's generated images are more photorealistic than Imagen's, which demonstrates the issues of subjectivity when collecting results such as these. The authors choose to ask human raters'which image is more photorealistic?'

"AI as a Service" (AIaaS) is a rapidly growing market, offering various plug-and-play AI services and tools. AIaaS enables its customers (users) - who may lack the expertise, data, and/or resources to develop their own systems - to easily build and integrate AI capabilities into their applications. Yet, it is known that AI systems can encapsulate biases and inequalities that can have societal impact. This paper argues that the context-sensitive nature of fairness is often incompatible with AIaaS' 'one-size-fits-all' approach, leading to issues and tensions. Specifically, we review and systematise the AIaaS space by proposing a taxonomy of AI services based on the levels of autonomy afforded to the user. We then critically examine the different categories of AIaaS, outlining how these services can lead to biases or be otherwise harmful in the context of end-user applications. In doing so, we seek to draw research attention to the challenges of this emerging area.

OpenAI's ChatGPT's AI chatbot is so good, too many people are using it, crushing its servers. So the company is debuting a paid ChatGPT Plus service, which will launch in the coming weeks. ChatGPT will cost $20 per month, but don't despair. OpenAI says that it still plans to offer a free version of ChatGPT as well. If you've used ChatGPT before, you know how crazy powerful the chatbot can be.

ChatGPT, the AI chatbot that has blown up over the last few months, is going premium. After confirming a few weeks ago that it would test a paid plan, OpenAI has rolled out ChatGPT Plus. Although people will still be able to use the chatbot for free, there are of course some perks that come with a ChatGPT Plus plan. OpenAI says subscribers will have general access to the chatbot, even during peak times. They'll also get faster response times from ChatGPT, along with priority access to upgrades and new features.

We're launching a pilot subscription plan for ChatGPT, a conversational AI that can chat with you, answer follow-up questions, and challenge incorrect assumptions. ChatGPT Plus is available to customers in the United States, and we will begin the process of inviting people from our waitlist over the coming weeks. We plan to expand access and support to additional countries and regions soon. We love our free users and will continue to offer free access to ChatGPT. By offering this subscription pricing, we will be able to help support free access availability to as many people as possible.

If you're not interested in where these images came from, simply scroll past the all the text to view them. Start reading here or watch me make some AI art with OpenAI's DALL·E 2 in the video below. Similar to DALL·E 2, Midjourney is an AI art generator that takes text prompts as input and generates four images per prompt as output. In order to use it, you need a Discord account connected to the Midjourney bot. While this was annoying and took me 10 minutes to set up, I think it's worth the effort. To try it out, you'll type the command /imagine and then enter your prompts directly into a Midjourney newbies channel for free. The downside of the free version is that you get only 25 prompts and you'll keep your eyes glued to the screen while your creations flash by and are lost in a chaotic jumble of results from everyone else who's on the channel with you. Any art you make is also posted publicly on their website under your username and you may use your images under a Creative Commons license as long as you cite Midjourney as the source. There's a lot of joy you can get out of 25 free prompts, but do take a bit of time to see what comes out of other people's prompts so you get the hang of some "prompt engineering" (how to phrase your prompt to get the result you want) before you start, else you might waste your 25 opportunities.