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AI enters the working world

It’s looking like 2023 will be the year that artificial intelligence enters the mainstream. Will it bring benefits to the world of work, or will it just bring P45s

Putting livelihoods in danger? Illustrators fear being put out of work by ‘generative’ AI tools, which can reproduce the style of human artists. Picture: Getty

Two events in 2022 brought artificial intelligence (AI) to the forefront of many of our minds. First, it learned to draw. Then it learned to write.

AI art applications such as Stable Diffusion, DALL-E and Midjourney proved they can, from simple text prompts, produce complex illustrations. They can also rip off the work of human artists, reducing their corpus to mere algorithmic input.

Naturally, the response from illustrators was not positive. Not only fearing being ...