The AI Arms Race Is Changing Everything

For the past 300,000 years we've been unique in our ability to make art, cuisine, manifestos, societies: to envision and craft something new where there was nothing before. While you're reading this sentence, artificial intelligence (AI) programs are painting cosmic portraits, responding to emails, preparing tax returns, and recording metal songs. Artificial intelligence has already had a pervasive impact on our lives. AIs are used to price medicine and houses, assemble cars, determine what ads we see on social media. But generative AI, a category of system that can be prompted to create wholly novel content, is much newer.