We live in a science-fictional world. We may not have the flying cars or moon bases promised to us by the writers of yesteryear, but our reality is different in ways those same writers couldn’t have possibly imagined.

The cover art of this month’s issue wasn’t painstakingly drawn by a human artist. Instead, it was generated by an AI called Midjourney, one of several that have recently become available and which are quickly getting better and better. I spent all of five minutes ordering it about in order to produce this image (and many others; this is a really fun game). Consider that I’m no expert, and others have been able to generate far better quality art by learning the commands and techniques in the same way one might learn to write scripts or code.

In the future as sketched out by many writers, art was the one thing humans could do better than machines. In the real world, we have awesome-looking computer-generated art on demand. What are the practical and ethical implications of this? Am I helping to drive the nail into the coffin of human art by using this image instead of shelling out a few bucks to license or commission a person to create it for me? And how soon will an AI be able to generate a foreword like this one from a prompt?

Much has been written on the subject, and undoubtedly much more will be. In fact, we have an article by author and graphic designer Jay O’Connell, who has been sharing fascinating insights on the subject in this very issue. We also have many excellent stories from across the globe, stories an AI can’t imagine and write down. Yet.

If there’s any lesson to be learned here it’s that quality AI fiction may be coming a lot sooner than any of us think. Certainly long before most of us might get our hands on a flying car.

Happy reading!