A version of this essay has been published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/big-story-in-technology-is-generative-ai-and-it-is-like-riding-a-tiger-11916172.html The past year has seen a number of newsworthy stories in science and technology, and several of them may turn out to be of great significance. For instance the protein-folding smarts of Deep Mind’s Alphafold and Meta’s ESMfold may be a game-changer in the creation of new molecules, specifically in drug discovery, although these drugs will take at least a decade to show up on pharmacy shelves. Lawrence Livermore Labs (US Department of Energy) made an apparent breakthrough in nuclear fusion, although a commercial reactor is still years or decades away. The James Webb space telescope captured extraordinary views of the universe.  Then there was the spectacle of the meltdown of cryptocurrencies (again) in the wake of the antics of Sam Bankman-Fried. And the ongoing saga of the “manufacturing consent” by Twitter and US government/Democratic party agents: potentially Watergate 2.0. But quite possibly the most exciting event of all was the unveiling of the AI bots ChatGPT for text and DALL-E 2, Imagen and Midjourney for images, all generated with simple commands entered by a user. Stable Diffusion, Google and Meta also demonstrated text-to-video. ChatGPT and DALL-E are two artificial intelligence (AI) tools that are making significant strides in bringing AI to the public. Both tools have the ability to generate text and images, respectively, in a way that is convincing to humans. This has the potential to revolutionize the way we create and consume content, as entire books, including illustrations, could potentially be written by these tools. ChatGPT is a chatbot that uses the GPT-3 language model developed by OpenAI. It is capable of generating natural language responses to prompts, making it possible for users to have conversations with it as if it were a human. This technology has already been integrated into a number of popular messaging apps and virtual assistants, making it widely available to the public. One potential use for ChatGPT is in the creation of written content. It could be used to generate entire books, including storylines, character development, and descriptions. ChatGPT could even be trained on a specific genre or style of writing, allowing it to create content that is tailored to a specific audience. DALL-E is another AI tool developed by OpenAI that is capable of generating images based on a given text prompt. It works by using a neural network to understand the meaning of the text and then generating an image that represents that meaning. The results produced by DALL-E can be quite convincing, with many of the images it creates being indistinguishable from those created by humans. Like ChatGPT, DALL-E has the potential to revolutionize the way we create and consume content. It could be used to generate illustrations for books, magazines, and other printed materials, reducing the need for human artists. It could also be used to generate images for social media and other online platforms, providing a quick and easy way to create visually appealing content. Overall, ChatGPT and DALL-E are bringing AI to the public in a way that is both accessible and useful. These tools have the potential to change the way we create and consume content, and may eventually result in entire books, including illustrations, being written convincingly by AI. While there are certainly ethical and societal implications to consider with the advancement of these technologies, they have the potential to greatly enhance and improve our daily lives. In the spirit of full disclosure, permit me to point out that the preceding six paragraphs were written by ChatGPT on a simple prompt: “write an essay about how chatgpt and dall-e are bringing artificial intelligence to the public, and may result in entire books, including illustrations, being written co