Catch me up: How to try the new AI tech everyone is talking about

The current wave of AI products is built on a technical breakthrough called generative AI. It allows a computer to create images or words that look like they might have been made by a human. It does this by studying zillions of pictures and text samples, often scraped from the web. To use them, you feed them an English-language phrase telling them what you want to do. Figuring out the right prompt is becoming an art of its own.