AI's Cool New Trick

One of my lingering misgivings from my days as a reporter at the Wall Street Journal concerns the role I played in unleashing PowerPoint on the world. I was just doing my job. Like all good journalists, I was at the bar, at a conference in the spring of 1987, when a consultant I knew introduced me to one of the two founders of a startup that was about to unveil PowerPoint. The demo he showed me was intriguing, and the prospects for the product checked out with a number of smart folks I interviewed at the conference, so I wrote about it. Next thing you know, Microsoft buys the startup, and we're all awash in bullet points and so many fonts and type sizes that presentations may look like ransom notes. Today, I'd like to introduce you to the latest advancement in visual presentations, an artificial intelligence that lets you generate an image based on a single sentence -- for instance, the AI produced the image above based on the prompt, "astronaut riding a horse in a photorealistic style."