This is The Guardian.

In January 2021, the Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory, OpenAI, gave a limited

release to a piece of software called Dali. The software allowed users to enter a simple

description of an image they had in their mind, and after a brief pause. The software

would produce an almost uncannily good interpretation of their suggestion. Worthy of a job illustrator

or Adobe proficient designer, but much faster, and for free.

Coming in, for example, a pig with wings flying over the moon, illustrated by Antoine

de Sont-Exuberie, resulted, after a minute or two of processing, in something reminiscent

of the patchy, but recognizable watercolour brushes of the creator of the little prince.

A year or so later, when the software got a wider release, the internet went wild. Social

media was flooded with all sorts of bizarre and wondrous creations, an exuberant hodgepodge

of fantasies and artistic styles. And a few months later, it happened again. This time,

with language, and a product called ChatGPT, also produced by OpenAI.

Ask ChatGPT to produce a summary of the book of Job in the style of the poet Alan Ginsberg,

and it would come up with a reasonable attempt in a few seconds. Ask it to render Ginsberg's

poem Howell in the form of a management consultant's slide deck presentation, and it would do that too.

The abilities of these programs to conjure up strange new worlds in words and pictures

alike entranced the public, and the desire to have a go oneself produced a growing literature

on the ins and outs of making the best use of these tools. And particularly, how to structure

inputs to get the most interesting outcomes. The latter skill has become known as prompt

engineering. The technique of framing one's instructions in terms most clearly understood

by the system, so it returns the results that most closely match expectations, or perhaps

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