  Some have criticised Generative AI Systems for replicating the familiar
pathologies of already widely-deployed AI systems. Other critics highlight how
they foreshadow vastly more powerful future systems, which might threaten
humanity's survival. The first group says there is nothing new here; the other
looks through the present to a perhaps distant horizon. In this paper, I
instead pay attention to what makes these particular systems distinctive: both
their remarkable scientific achievement, and the most likely and consequential
ways in which they will change society over the next five to ten years. In
particular, I explore the potential societal impacts and normative questions
raised by the looming prospect of 'Generative Agents', in which multimodal
large language models (LLMs) form the executive centre of complex, tool-using
AI systems that can take unsupervised sequences of actions towards some goal.
