Many of us have, by now, seen a new crop of images online that look not-quite-right, or not quite believable (in the sense of slightly wrong images of famous people doing strange things); and many of us know, or have heard about, the explosion in AI imaging through programs like DALL-E, Midjourney, and an ever-increasing number of others. Some of us have friends or online friends who are producing images that have us intrigued. I have such a friend in Jonathan Hoefler, and as a discussion of the ethics/dangers of AI ensued on one of his Facebook posts (and for the purposes of this article, unless noted otherwise, when I refer to "AI" I am referring specifically to the image-generating form of AI, not the text-generating or any other kind or use), I decided I'd better check it out for myself before arguing either for or against. I was a bit afraid of getting into it because I was worried it might "imagine" better than I do, leaving me feel useless as an artist. I'd also heard it's addictive, and I was worried about that too.

I became Editor-in-Chief of Communications of the ACM (CACM) to make the magazine again the forum where the computer science community shares ("communicates") its most important results. Whether you compute with bits or qubits, write software or proofs, develop algorithms or neural networks, teach or take classes, work in industry or academia, live in the U.S. or elsewhere, believe tech is the way forward or not, CACM should be the place to share your best work with our broad, diverse, and international community. Early in my career, CACM played this role. Everyone in the field read the magazine, and the CS community shared its most important results there. To get a sense, look at the 1983 CACM 25th Anniversary issue (https://dl.acm.org/toc/cacm/1983/26/1), which reprinted articles from the magazine's early years.

If you were into video games in the 1980s or 90s, then along with your computer, your QuickShot joystick and your tape player, there was one other vital component of your set-up: a games magazine. For me it was Zzap! 64, a glossy mag dedicated to the Commodore 64 with brilliant, opinionated writers, excellent features, and an exhaustive tips section. I would rush to the newsagent on publication day, bring it home with almost religious reverence, then read it from cover to cover. And then I would go back and read it again. This was how I discovered new games such as Sentinel, Elite and Leaderboard, but also, through the letters page and competitions, joined a community of players, years before the world wide web allowed us all to get in contact. In the 80s, video game magazines were the internet.