Nigel Powell
Nigel Powell is an author, columnist, and consultant with over 30 years of experience in the technology industry. He produced the weekly Don't Panic technology column in the Sunday Times newspaper for 16 years and is the author of the Sunday Times book of Computer Answers, published by Harper Collins. He has been a technology pundit on Sky Television's Global Village program and a regular contributor to BBC Radio Five's Men's Hour.
He has an Honours degree in law (LLB) and a Master's Degree in Business Administration (MBA), and his work has made him an expert in all things software, AI, security, privacy, mobile, and other tech innovations. Nigel currently lives in West London and enjoys spending time meditating and listening to music.
Latest articles by Nigel Powell

Will digital watermarking save the world from fake news?
By Nigel Powell published
Companies are actively looking for a way to watermark AI-generated content, but is it necessary?

Suno just got a major upgrade — now you can replace a verse or chorus
By Nigel Powell published
Suno's new 'replace section' feature is an innovative game-changer, which lets users tweak the lyrics at any time without needing a do-over.

I just tried Flux on my Windows PC — and it's absolutely mind blowing
By Nigel Powell published
The Flux AI image generator finally runs on your PC, and it's magnificent. One click install using Forge, superb images with text, and decently fast on a standard GPU. What's not to love?

I write about AI for a living — and NotebookLM is the most exciting tech to arrive since ChatGPT
By Nigel Powell published
Google's new NotebookLM is the start of a revolution in how we interact with information. We'd better get used to it.

I tried Udio's new lyric generator — it’s a game changer for writer’s block
By Nigel Powell published
The new Lyric Writer tool from Udio helps songwriters craft the perfect words for their tracks. It's fast, flexible and lets you add song structure tags too.

A company gave 1,000 AI agents access to Minecraft — and they built a society
By Nigel Powell published
AI agents can be given a large language model brain and left to their own devices. In a recent test researchers left 1,000 of them to run free on a Minecraft server.

I gave four AI image generators a 'realism test' — and the winner surprised me
By Nigel Powell published
Testing AI image generators can be a challenge as they all behave and follow prompts in different ways. Here we've tried it with four random models on realistic prompts.

Hotshot is a new free text-to-video platform — and it’s very good indeed
By Nigel Powell published
Hotshot offers short-form AI video with a degree of photorealism and impressive movement.

I'm a serial entrepreneur — here's why AI is bringing about a golden age for side hustles
By Nigel Powell published
Artificial intelligence makes it easier than ever to get a side hustle off the ground.

Meet LoudMe — a free AI music generator that can make you a whole song in seconds
By Nigel Powell published
LoudMe joins Suno and Udio in the AI text-to-song space with tracks up to three minutes long from a simple prompt.

Leonardo review
By Nigel Powell published
Leonardo is a powerful AI image generator capable of creating graphics, textures and photorealistic pictures from text.

Runway review: One impressive AI video generator
By Nigel Powell published
Runway is the leading AI video generator, offering lip-synching, image-to-video, text-to-video and realistic human motion.

Claude AI review
By Nigel Powell published
Claude 3.5 Sonnet is one of the most impressive AI language models and Claude is a powerful chatbot platform.

AI glossary: all the key terms explained including LLM, models, tokens and chatbots
By Nigel Powell last updated
Artificial intelligence is a rapidly evolving area of technology and with it comes some confusing terms. We've tried to make sense of everything from LLM to tokens.

Nokia AI drones in a box — is this our first taste of Skynet?
By Nigel Powell published
Nokia is providing AI-powered drones to keep an eye on people living in Switzerland.

Udio review
By Nigel Powell published
Udio is one of the best AI music generators on the market and is getting better with new, regular updates.

Google just dropped Gemma 2 — the power of GPT-3.5 on a phone is here
By Nigel Powell published
Google DeepMind is investing in its Gemma family of open-source models including create small but mighty options.

I put Pinokio 2 to the test — it’s now easier than ever to run AI on your computer
By Nigel Powell published
Pinokio lets you run chatbots, image generators and music AI on your laptop at the click of a button.

I tried LivePortrait — a fun way to animate headshots
By Nigel Powell published
LivePortrait is a new AI model that can take any video or webcam feed and use it to animate a portrait photo or drawing.

Meet Websim — the AI playground that lets you make anything you can imagine in seconds
By Nigel Powell published
Websim is a hidden gem in the AI space. Its a virtual internet where you can use Claude or GPT-4o to create web apps and projects.

Hume AI brings its creepy emotional AI chatbot to iPhone
By Nigel Powell published
Hume has launched a new iPhone app to bring its 'emotional' AI chatbot to your personal device, letting you talk while it tries to understand your emotional state.

I tried the new ElevenLabs Video to Sound Effects demo — and it's pretty amazing
By Nigel Powell published
ElevenLabs launches a new API and demo aimed at adding sound to silent AI video generations.

5 ways AI will change how we live in the future
By Nigel Powell published
AI is going to change how we live, work and rest over the next decade. In many ways it is already having a significant impact but here are the areas we'll see the biggest change.

OpenAI's Sora will allow us all to become filmmakers in the future — Ashton Kutcher says of the AI video model
By Nigel Powell published
Ashton Kutcher has beta access to OpenAI Sora and says its already good enough for use in mainstream movies and will one day allow anyone to create their own films.
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