As unbelievable as it sounds, ChatGPT was launched a year ago today. So huge has it been, so controversial and so reported upon, that it feels much, much longer. But it doesn’t look like ChatGPT is going to disappear anytime soon.

Officially, it’s called Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer and is, essentially, just an AI-based chatbot that responds to user-inputted prompts. You can chat to it, you can ask it questions, you can get it to do your homework for you, but maybe double-check the end result. Naturally, much of its controversy derives from the fact that it is somewhat too good. It can generate worryingly accurate and human-like responses to prompts and, when it comes to passing something like the Turing test, this can spark some worries. But, it can also have many positive, and interesting, uses.

A few weeks back, we chatted with the Dutch designer Iris van Herpen. As someone who has always been at the forefront of the collaboration between fashion and technology, Van Herpen was openly excited about developing her own version of ChatGPT — A-Iris. “In terms of giving people access to all of the knowledge that is within my work,” she told us, “I think it’s a very good tool. So I’m currently training my second ‘me’ right now, who is called A-Iris. I’m feeding it with all of my previous interviews, but also giving it answers to questions.” She hoped that A-Iris could be set up in her exhibitions and it would be able to act as a proxy-Iris, answering all the questions that people have in the way that Iris herself would answer them.

Even the world of writing has been changed utterly by ChatGPT, in another recent interview, the cult Irish writer Blindboy Boatclub shared that he used the programme to help him understand his own stories. “If I had the first draft of a story, I’d fuck it into AI, and what I’d say is “analyse this story using the Hero’s Journey”, “analyse this story using Jungian psychology”, “analyse this story using…Lévi-Strauss!” And AI will give you a kind of dogshit interpretation of it but that dogshit interpretation it spits out can cause me to think about the work in a new critical way.”

It hasn’t all been so smooth for ChatGPT, however. The programme’s developer, OpenAI, recently ousted their CEO Sam Altman for mysterious reasons, one of which may be because of a secret new AI model known as Q* that some employees feel is too powerful and may surpass even human intelligence. Exciting, or horrifying? Perhaps both. We’ll just have to wait and see what ChatGPT’s second year brings.