(Note: in this piece, I link to a lot of websites that I’ve played with at different times. This is to allow the reader to make up their own minds about these things. No endorsement is intended, except of course when I am linking to my own books. If I didn’t like them, I wouldn’t publish them.)

First off, what we see today is not truly artificial intelligence, in the sense of “artificial sapient beings capable of exercising judgment and choice.” ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion and their many cousins and descendants are Large Learning Models (LLMs), software that has been programmed to extrapolate statistical information from the dataset it is given and offer randomized responses to human commands based on the dataset and the extrapolations. The results are only as good as the initial programming, and the dataset. And in terms of output, they’re only vastly more complicated versions of the random generators available at Seventh Sanctum and similar websites for more than a decade. Here are the situations in which I personally have used LLMs: