GPT-4 has brought a storm of hype and fright – is it marketing froth, or is this a revolution? Charlie Beckett

The recent flurry, or rather blizzard, of announcements of new variants of generative AI have brought a storm of hype and fright. OpenAI's ChatGPT already appeared to be a gamechanger, but now this week's new version, GPT-4, is another leap ahead. GPT-4 can generate enough text to write a book, code in every computer language, and – most remarkably – "understand" images. If your mind is not boggled by the potential of this, then you haven't been paying attention. I have spent the past five years researching how artificial intelligence has been changing journalism around the world.