"Please Slow Down" - The 7 Biggest AI Stories of 2022

In 2022, we have arguably touched the knee of the curve when it comes to generative AI capable of producing creative works comprised of text, images, audio, and video. This year, deep learning AI emerged from a decade of research and began to find its way into commercial applications, allowing millions of people to try the technology for the first time. AI creations have inspired wonder, created controversy, triggered existential crises and turned heads.

Here's a look at the seven most important AI stories of the year. It was hard to pick just seven, but if we hadn't cut it somewhere, we'd still be writing about this year's events into 2023 and beyond.

April: DALL-E 2 dreams in pictures

Enlarge / A DALL-E example of "an astronaut on horseback". Open AI

In April, OpenAI announced DALL-E 2, a deep learning image synthesis model that blew my mind with its seemingly magical ability to generate images from text prompts. Trained on hundreds of millions of images retrieved from the Internet, DALL-E 2 was able to create new combinations of images using a technique called latent diffusion.

Twitter was quickly filled with images of astronauts on horseback, teddy bears roaming ancient Egypt, and other near-photorealistic works. We last heard about DALL-E a year ago when version 1 of the model had trouble rendering a low resolution lawyer chair. Suddenly Version 2 was illustrating our wildest dreams at 1024×1024 resolution.

At first, due to misuse concerns, OpenAI only allowed 200 beta testers to use DALL-E 2. Content filters blocked violent and sexual prompts. Gradually, OpenAI allowed more than one million people to participate in a closed trial, and DALL-E 2 finally became available for everyone at the end of September. But by then, another contender in the world of latent scattering had arisen, as we'll see below.

July: Google engineer thinks LaMDA is sensitive

Enlarge / Former Google Engineer Blake Lemoine. Getty I...