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Artificial intelligence is everywhere. It’s used in virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa. It’s used by Netflix to help us decide what to watch. It’s in our sat-navs, telling us the quickest route to our destination.

While this everyday use of AI seems like a lifetime away from the cyberpunk visions of the future described in science fiction, progress is being made and the possible applications of artificial intelligence are expanding.

Recently, attention has turned to how this technology is used in art. Several AI generators have cropped up in the last year, available online for anyone to use.

There's a slight hint of Doncaster Minster about this AI image of Doncaster, although it looks a bit different in the year 3000.

With just a simple prompt, these generators create images and texts without any other human intervention.

This technology was initially used to recognise patterns in images from CCTV footage or databases, but has now been developed to complete the much more complex task of creating images based on those patterns.

This may seem harmless, but for some it raises interesting ethical and philosophical questions.

Earlier this week, musician Nick Cave published a scathing blog post on the use of AI-generated lyrics after a fan used generator ChatGPT to write a song in his style.

AI reckons Doncaster will have a futuristic dome by the year 3000 - an evolution of the leisure centre at Lakeside, or the depot used to store gritting salt at the Doncaster Council depot on North Bridge perhaps?

Superficially, it had the trappings of a Nick Cave song – melancholic, dark imagery, references to death and religion – but the singer described it as “a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human.”

He argued: “What makes a great song great is not its close resemblance to a recognizable work. Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite.”

With that in mind, we tested out AI generator NightCafe and to see what Doncaster might look like in the future.

We gave NightCafe the text prompt – “Doncaster in the year 3000” – and the results are somewhat interesting to say the least, with a mixture of towering skyscrapers, fantasy style domes and citadels and a somewhat dystopian landscape, shrouded in gloom.

Images: NightCafe. Visit the website HERE

Five images of what AI thinks Doncaster will look like in the year 3000