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Last month a photograph generated by artificial intelligence won the creative open category of the prestigious Sony world photography awards. The photographer, Boris Eldagsen, openly admitted that the image was AI generated and refused to accept the award, saying he had entered it to start a debate over whether an AI-generated image could in fact be a photograph.

The stunt was a response to an explosion in readily accessible AI tools. Last November’s launch of ChatGPT was, on the face of it, one of the most momentous technological advances in recent years. A text-based system, ChatGPT can write stories, college essays, job applications and so on in clear, fluent language and, if the user so chooses, in the style of Shakespeare, Donald Trump or Chaucer.

It clocked up over 100 million users in the first two months after launch, making it the fastest growing consumer application in history. And, less than four months after ChatGPT hit the headlines, OpenAI, the developer, launched GPT-4, the successor to GPT-3, the artificial intelligence system on which ChatGPT is based.