2020: a robot writes an op-ed

The Guardian published an article titled "A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?" It was produced by GPT-3, which has 175 billion parameters. The story is more complicated than the headline, though. TechTalks wrote a careful piece pointing out that the published article was edited from several machine-generated drafts, and that the framing exaggerated what the model could do alone. Lesson one: read how a demo was produced, not only what it shows.

2021 and 2022: text becomes images

DALL-E and Midjourney turned prompts like "an armchair shaped like an avocado" into pictures. In 2022 a Midjourney-assisted piece took first prize in a digital art category at the Colorado State Fair, which started a long argument about what counts as art.

30 November 2022: ChatGPT

ChatGPT launched as a free chat box that wrote essays, code and poems. According to a UBS analyst note reported by Reuters and Euronews, it reached an estimated 100 million users in about two months, the fastest-growing consumer app on record at that point.

March 2023: GPT-4 and the bar exam

OpenAI said GPT-4 passed a simulated bar exam and scored around the top 10% of test takers. That claim travelled everywhere. Later, MIT research re-checked the result and, as LiveScience summarised it, found the model did not do nearly as well as claimed. The re-analysis put it below the 70th percentile overall. Lesson two: verify the hype, even when it comes from the company that built the model.

March 2023: the Pope in a puffer jacket

A Midjourney image of Pope Francis in a white designer puffer coat went viral on Twitter. NBC News described it as one of the first wide-scale examples of misinformation from AI-generated images. Lots of people believed it. Lesson three: seeing stopped being believing.

What these three lessons mean for you

Read the method. A demo is a story, not a measurement.
Check the claim. If an exam score or a benchmark matters to your decision, find the independent replication.
Doubt the picture. For anything that matters, look for the original source, a second angle, or a credible outlet that confirmed it.

Yaad rakhein: AI tools are strong at producing convincing output. Whether it is correct is your job.

Sources

Part of the talk "The AI Era" by Faisal Adnan, Riphah International University, 6 November 2026.

Then Machines Started to Create: GPT-3, ChatGPT, GPT-4 and the Pope in a Puffer Jacket