Amazon.com Inc's cloud computing division on Thursday released a suite of technologies aimed at helping other companies develop their own chatbots and image-generation services backed by artificial intelligence.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) said it will offer a service called Bedrock to build and scale generative AI applications, which can generate text, images, audio and synthetic data in response to prompts.

The service will let customers work with Amazon's own proprietary foundation model called Amazon Titan, but it will also offer a menu of models offered by other companies. The first third-party options will come from startups AI21 Labs, Anthropic and Stability AI alongside Amazon's own models.

The Bedrock service lets AWS customers test-drive those technologies without having to deal with the underlying data center servers that power them.

Generative AI and concerns over the technology

The most famous generative AI application is ChatGPT, a chatbot that Microsoft-backed OpenAI released late last year.

Google and Microsoft are the biggest companies to put generative AI into widely used software, such as Gmail and Microsoft Word.

But the technology and its applications have been dogged by concerns that its talents could lead to cheating in schools, disinformation on the web and even replace human workers.  

To be specific, school systems have fretted about students turning in AI-drafted essays, undermining the hard work required for them to learn. Cybersecurity researchers have also expressed concern that generative AI could allow bad actors, even governments, to produce more disinformation than before.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk said at the World Government Summit held in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, that "One of the biggest risks to the future of civilization is AI."

Musk said the development of the application is "both positive or negative and has great, great promise, great capability," but "with that comes great danger."

French privacy watchdog, the National Commission on Informatics and Liberty, said on Tuesday that it was investigating several complaints about ChatGPT.

It said this after the chatbot was temporarily banned in Italy over a suspected breach of privacy rules.

(With input from agencies)