After years in which artificial intelligence-generated content was known more for its comic absurdity—only occasionally drifting into disconcerting realism—2022 was the year that generative AI finally graduated into a full-fledged creative force.

A host of realistic image generators led by research group OpenAI’s Dall-E 2 made it easy for anyone to create lifelike visuals with a simple text prompt. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s ChatGPT put a conversational interface on the organization’s state-of-the-art text generation system, allowing users to simply instruct a machine what to write and receive a detailed and rhetorically sound—if not always factually correct—passage in seconds.