Overall it was an intriguing experience to play around with these tools, especially for a creative person like me. There is still a long way to go in terms of how to get the best out of them, especially when it comes to phrasing your prompts for maximum efficacy in the output phase, but I imagine that will improve over time. In fact, there are websites dedicated to helping you compose aptly worded prompts for these tools, and you can even ask the aforementioned ChatGPT to compose a prompt for you too.
There is much to unpack here and these tools (and others) will be the subject of a future post, but for now I see them as very sophisticated synthesisers. Back in the day you could program different sounds into a synth to correspond to each key on the keyboard, and these tools are not dissimilar in many ways, although the keyboards are different. While these AI synths have millions of notes compressed into them, at the end of the day, in order to elicit the best creative outputs you still need time honoured things like imagination from the composer. For now, we can rest easy and play with these digital toys, because true creative work still requires an original mind at the keyboard.