Generative Artificial Intelligence

The public debut of GPT-4-class models in early 2023 — large language models able to draft essays, write code and hold plausible conversations on almost any topic — sparked a cascade of technopanics. A March 2023 open letter organised by the Future of Life Institute (a non-profit focused on catastrophic risk) urged a six-month pause on training models more powerful than GPT-4, and gathered signatures from Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and thousands of researchers.

Governments shifted quickly from worry to rule-making. The US issued an AI Executive Order on 30 October 2023, requiring safety testing for the most powerful models; President Trump revoked it on 20 January 2025 and replaced it with a pro-innovation order stripping out most reporting requirements. The EU AI Act, the world's first comprehensive AI law, was approved by Parliament (March 2024), adopted by Council (May 2024), and entered into force on 1 August 2024. The UK (Bletchley Park, 1–2 November 2023) and South Korea (Seoul, 21–22 May 2024) hosted back-to-back AI-Safety Summits, where governments and labs agreed voluntary testing commitments. Hollywood's 2023 WGA (Writers Guild of America) and SAG-AFTRA (screen-actors' union) strikes won first-of-their-kind protections requiring studios to get actors' and writers' consent before training AI on their work or using digital replicas. Copyright owners — the New York Times, the Authors Guild, Getty Images, major record labels — filed landmark lawsuits against OpenAI, Stability AI and others for training on their content without permission; the NYT case survived a motion to dismiss in March 2025. An AI-generated robocall impersonating President Biden hit New Hampshire voters on 21 January 2024, reigniting misinformation alarms. And the International Energy Agency projected that global data-centre electricity demand would roughly double by 2030 on the back of the AI boom.

The core tension: systems able to out-produce, out-persuade or out-think humans carry both warnings — displacement, misinformation, concentrations of power — and opportunities — augmenting human work, accelerating science, extending creativity — that are still being disentangled in real time. This site is built to hold those two together rather than choose between them.