esterday, as I scrolled through my Facebook feed, a stunning painting of the New York skyline caught my eye. The quality of brush strokes in vibrant colours seemed to suggest that it might have been rendered by Vincent van Gogh. But van Gogh had died in 1890. New York would not have looked like that back then. “Of course,” I reminded myself, “not van Gogh.” The next thought was: “Welcome to the world of artificial intelligence.”

What had earlier seemed like science fiction, became a reality in November 2022 when OpenAI launched its first AI chat model, ChatGPT.

With that launch, the idea of talking to a machine in a natural language became a reality. This radically changed many people’s lives worldwide. Every day since that breakthrough we have been hearing something exciting about how AI capabilities are expanding beyond creating text to include images, videos and ‘art.’

Immediately after he was sworn in, US President Donald Trump announced a $500 billion private sector investment to fund infrastructure for artificial intelligence, a joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank and MGX.

AI has already revolutionised everyday lives by taking over routine tasks, freeing people to focus on what truly matters to them. Emails can be drafted even in specific contexts. Meeting notes? Not only can AI transcribe them, but it can also translate them into any language you need. AI agents are there to provide a list of actions, tasks and even agenda points for future meetings. Presentation slides can be made in a few minutes. Large documents can be summarised in seconds. The developers of AI tools are working to automate routine tasks that would take hours, days and weeks in the pre-AI age. ChatGPT has launched a scheduled tasks model to make life easier for people by accomplishing tasks as and when required, truly achieving the “your wish is my command.”

So if AI can accomplish everything instantly, what will humans do with the rest of their time? What if machines and algorithms become more intelligent than humans; they are already faster than us? The answers vary. The people designing the multimodal applications (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok and Apple Intelligent) are constantly pushing the envelope. Even the following appears to be only a slightly exaggeration: “In the era of AI, Our tasks have become very easy. We have only two significant tasks left: to be amazed and to be amused”.

Will the AI end up making us more creative? There are all kinds of apprehensions and reservations regarding the impact of AI on creativity. Currently, around 3,000 AI-enabled tools are available to handle an incredible range of tasks. About 500 of those are dedicated to generative art, video and music. A race is currently on among various companies to produce the most impressive pictures using minimal prompts and make videos with different camera angles just by writing the prompts. If you have already used image/ video generation AI tools, you know that these continue to try to produce images that are closer to what the prompter thinks and writes.

The AI tools need computational power and resources (efficient algorithms) to create graphics. This is the new battleground. The developers are working extensively to produce output that is ever closer to the input. Recently, some of them have produced images that exceed expectations. Not only can the latest AI tools write prompts themselves, but they can also help users refine their input to get better results. To address underperformance, these AI tools do something extra: they create variations and provide options to further refine the output.

Midjourney has been a dominant player in image generation. It can use prompts to generate an image in the style of any of the famous artists including van Gogh and Picasso - no questions asked, no royalties paid. It’s a free world, at least for now. A plethora of image-generation tools has flooded the market, creating millions of images using natural language prompts. From OpenAI’s DALL·E to Google Labs’ Image FX and Grok’s image generation by X, over 300 tools are available, each competing for popularity and market dominance. Video generation models are also reaching the general public as the developers have achieved more optimised methods to overcome resource requirements (90-plus available to date).

It doesn’t stop with visual art. AI tools are also crafting prose, writing poetry and composing music. If one can expose these to Faiz, Faraz, Parveen or Shakespeare, the AI tools can generate literature in their style and using similar vocabulary. Music is another field where AI tools are growing fast. However, the quality of AI-generated output varies and the copyright question remains unanswered. If creativity were to be defined as mixing things up, then AI is doing it.

Leading technopreneurs and tech analysts agree that art will be the last fortress to be conquered by AI. Their optimism prompts deeper questions like: will human creativity endure if we grow addicted to AI tools? Will most people succumb to AI creativity, or will the majority remain creative and continue to beat AI tools? What about appreciation for creativity? Could it diminish once AI-generated art becomes the norm? These are tough questions with no easy answers.

Some of the AI tools have already been blamed for violating copyrights, data privacy and individual rights. In Third World countries like Pakistan, where respect for copyrights was always scant, there is finally a growing awareness regarding AI tools violating copyrights. This is a change in attitudes. Meanwhile, the rise of AI-generated images and videos has sparked a new debate: Can art created using AI be genuine? Can AI produce original paintings and unique ideas, or merely remix the existing ones? There are more questions for now than answers.

Such is the world of AI, full of potential and ambiguity.

Dr Yasir Ahmad teaches Engineering Management at NUST and can be reached at yasir299@gmail.com