Viewpoint: Diary of a Spectacle Designer

Artificial intelligence (AI) in general, and ChatGPT (generative pre-trained transformer) in particular, have been making the news recently and I decided to see if I needed to worry about a bot taking over my column in this magazine. This month, I wanted to write about the consolidation going on in our industry. A consolidation that was probably inevitable for many years but I believe the global pandemic made the conditions just right to accelerate the process. So, for a bit of fun, I paid £10 for a month’s premium subscription, opened the app and I asked my sinister looking ChatGPT to write an essay on ‘the consolidation of the eyewear industry and what this means to eyewear brands like Tom Davies’. That just about covers what I planned to write.