As a rather commercially successful author once wrote, “the night is dark and full of terrors, the day bright and beautiful and full of hope.” It’s fitting imagery for AI, which like all tech has its upsides and downsides.

Art-generating models like Stable Diffusion, for instance, have led to incredible outpourings of creativity, powering apps and even entirely new business models. On the other hand, its open source nature lets bad actors to use it to create deepfakes at scale — all while artists protest that it’s profiting off of their work.

What’s on deck for AI in 2023? Will regulation rein in the worst of what AI brings, or are the floodgates open? Will powerful, transformative new forms of AI emerge, a la ChatGPT, disrupt industries once thought safe from automation?

With the success of Lensa, the AI-powered selfie app from Prisma Labs that went viral, you can expect a lot of me-too apps along these lines. And expect them to also be capable of being tricked into creating NSFW images, and to disproportionately sexualize and alter the appearance of women.

Maximilian Gahntz, a senior policy researcher at the Mozilla Foundation, said he expected integration of generative AI into consumer tech will amplify the effects of such systems, both the good and the bad.