What will it mean to live in an AI-powered world? That’s the central question of the special November issue of Maclean’s. We reached out to more than a dozen of Canada’s top AI thinkers, who wrote essays about how the tech will change health care, politics, education, even sex. Some of the predictions are chilling, others inspiring. We hope you will find them all eye-opening.
For the cover of the issue, we wanted to represent the existential threat AI presents to many jobs—and, depending on who you believe, to humanity. Maclean’s art director Anna Minzhulina used an AI image-making software called Imagine for the project. Services like Imagine are trained on massive image banks and designed to interpret users’ prompts to produce an infinite number of illustrations and designs.
Anna was skeptical of using an AI for creative work. But she was surprised by how much she enjoyed the process. She thought of the famous line from Hamlet and entered it into the prompt. “To be, or not to be, that is the question.” Out came the image on the cover.
I find it haunting and creepy. The robot holds the skull tenderly, as if it has complex emotions about being humanity’s overlord. Does AI have feelings? No, of course not. But sometimes it seems that way. In my recent interactions with AI, the tech has come off as relatable and human, with subtle emotional nuances: kindness, enthusiasm, sometimes a hint of a temper. Anna had the same impression. She was astonished to discover that when you work with AI, each time you enter a prompt, it produces a different response. “It’s moody,” she told me. “Hard to control.” In fact, she said, it was somewhat like working with a human illustrator.
—Sarah Fulford, editor-in-chief
