August 2022

August 2022 marks a watershed moment for generative AI, with the landmark launch of Stable Diffusion and the rapid expansion of Midjourney and DALL-E reshaping creative practice overnight — sparking debates about AI-generated tourist posters, album covers, and even David Bowie music videos. Alongside the creative explosion, early structural tensions emerge: AI systems are denied patent rights by US courts, machine learning is blamed for a reproducibility crisis in science, and the open release of OPT-175B as a free GPT-3 alternative accelerates public access. The AI ethics conversation broadens to include the EU's trustworthiness guidelines, Australia's national jobs summit grappling with automation's workforce implications, and a McKinsey report estimating that 25–46% of current Australian work activities could be automated by 2030. Prompt engineering surfaces as a nascent discipline, the Boston Dynamics AI Institute launches under Hyundai, and a general sense of both wonder and anxiety frames a month in which the term 'AI art apocalypse' no longer sounds hyperbolic.