“For all the terrible stuff humanity has already done with artificial intelligence, there’s an undeniable awe to it that I haven’t felt since I first started tinkering with computers back in the ’80s, when I wrote my first “Hello World” program. Back then, there was a prompt in which you typed esoteric lines of code using BASIC. It felt magical to make things out of words made of electrons. Today, using a text-to-image synthesis AI app like Midjourney or Dall-E makes me feel like a kid playing sorcerer again.”