4 AI tools that grabbed the headlines in 2022

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the way we live and work, and its impact is only set to grow in the coming years. AI is being used in a variety of industries, including healthcare, finance, and e-commerce, to improve efficiency, accuracy, and personalization. Companies like Google, IBM, OpenAI, etc, are spending billions to advance AI, with platforms like IBM’s Watson, or OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DALL-E 2, etc, which are shaping the way we interact with and use AI. 

Here are the biggest and most popular AI platforms that made heads turn in 2022.

ChatGPT

ChatGPT, the language model developed by AI research firm OpenAI, has been making waves over the past month. It is designed to generate human-like text in real-time, and as the year comes to an end ChatGPT has become one of the most talked about things in 2022. On December 5, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, tweeted that ChatGPT had one million users in less than a week since its launch. 

Although it is currently in the beta testing phase, it has already been used for multiple purposes. From students using it to write their homework essays to developers using it to spot errors in their code, ChatGPT has been in the spotlight. The AI has also been giving many already rival platforms competition in the short time since its release. According to a December 21 report by the New York Times, Google CEO Sundar Pichai “has upended the work of numerous groups inside the company to respond to the threat that ChatGPT poses.”

ChatGPT launched on wednesday. today it crossed 1 million users!

— Sam Altman (@sama) December 5, 2022

Dall-E 2

Another AI platform from OpenAI, DALL-E 2 is an AI powered tool released in November 2022, as an improved version of the original DALL-E AI system which was launched last year.

DALL-E is a neural network that uses machine learning to generate images from text descriptions, allowing users to create custom images on demand. DALL-E 2 is preferred over DALL-E for caption matching and photorealism when evaluators were asked to compare 1,000 image generations from each model, OpenAI claimed in a blog post.

Several companies, including Adobe, Facebook, and Microsoft, have also adopted it. For instance, DALL-E 2 is one of the AI tools used by Microsoft for the graphic design app Microsoft Designer’s AI-driven features. According to a September announcement by OpenAI, DALL-E 2 had over a million users and had been used to generate over two million unique images.

Midjourney

In essence, Midjourney is actually a platform spun off from DALL-E. It’s more an utility created by using an AI than an actual AI in itself. Midjourney is a tool for everybody who wants to make artistic images in minutes. 

A survey conducted by the developers of Midjourney claimed that more than 80% of companies using the platform reported an increase in customer engagement and conversions thus making it a popular choice among ad agencies and e-commerce websites.

Midjourney uses a bot on communications platform Discord to send and receive commands to the AI’s servers. It is currently in its beta testing phase. 

“Millions are using it. Our Discord is over two million. It’s the biggest active Discord server by far now,” said David Holz, the founder of Midjourney, in an interview for Forbes in September.

LensaAI

Lensa is an AI App launched by California-based Prisma Labs in 2018, that uses machine learning to analyze and optimize video content. It allows users to automatically identify the best moments in a video and create shorter, more engaging clips that are more likely to be shared on social media. 

In November 2022, it launched the "Magic Avatar" feature that has been sweeping social media. The app saw around 13 million worldwide installs in the first 12 days of December, up more than 600% than the two million it saw in November, according to data from analytics firm Sensor Tower. Lensa is expected to see even wider adoption in 2023. 

According to LensaAI, their platform has been used by more than a 100 companies worldwide in the retail, media, and education sectors, and their platform has been used by major brands to increase the reach and engagement of their video content by an average of 30 %.

While AI-powered solutions such as ChatGPT, DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and LensaAI have the potential to revolutionize a variety of industries, it's important to recognize that there are also potential negative impacts and risks associated with these platforms. 

bypassing chatgpt's content filter pic.twitter.com/RW9ZgaFhkU

— this is now a shitpost account (@samczsun) December 2, 2022

In December, a WIRED reporter wrote about her experience with Lensa, explaining how she received several fully nude results despite uploading only headshots. Similarly, another Twitter user, shared an image of an interaction between him and ChatGPT, which appeared to show he had found a way to get the bot to explain the process of making a Molotov cocktail. 

AI ethics experts have often noted that AI platforms like these could be used to re-enforce the already prevailing gender and race stereotypes or be used to propagate violence. On December 8, Bloomberg reported that ChatGPT had been tricked by researchers and others to spit out sexist and racist comments and code.