Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry.

Last year, the fantasy author Joanna Maciejewska went viral (if such a thing is still possible on X) with a post saying “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.” Clearly, it struck a chord with the disaffected masses.

Regrettably, 18 months after Maciejewska’s post, the entertainment industry insists that machines should make art and artists should do laundry. The streaming platform Disney+ has plans to let its users generate their own content from its intellectual property instead of, y’know, paying humans to make some new Star Wars or Marvel movies.

Elsewhere, it seems AI-generated music is resonating with a depressingly large audience, given that the AI band Breaking Rust has topped Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart. If the people demand AI slop, who are we to deny them?

Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry.

Just about all businesses these days seem to be pivoting to AI, even when they don’t seem to know exactly why they’re investing in it—or even what it really does. “Optimization,” “scaling,” and “maximizing efficiency” are convenient buzzwords bandied about to describe what AI can achieve in theory, but for most of AI companies’ eager customers, the hundreds of billions of dollars they’re pumping into the industry aren’t adding up. And maybe they never will.

This month’s news doesn’t exactly cast the technology in a glowing light either. A bunch of NGOs and aid agencies are using AI models to generate images of fake suffering people to guilt their Instagram followers. AI translators are pumping out low-quality Wikipedia pages in the languages most vulnerable to going extinct. And thanks to the construction of new AI data centers, lots of neighborhoods living in their shadows are getting forced into their own sort of pivots—fighting back against the power blackouts and water shortages the data centers cause. How’s that for optimization?

You can choose at this point whether to fold the pattern one twist at a time or to precrease the off-grid creases (just crease the short segments that have been printed, folded as mountains on the printed side of the pattern) and collapse everything all at once. Beginning folders may find it helpful to precrease the triangle and rhombus twists, to make the squashing process easier, even if you plan to fold the pattern one twist at a time. Solid red lines in the crease pattern represent mountain folds, and dashed blue lines represent valley folds. The faded lines inside the twists are helper folds used to set up the twists; they will not be used in the final pattern.

The central closed hexagon twist will be the first twist folded, and it’ll be made on the blank side of the paper. All the mountain folds for this twist (as viewed on the blank side of the paper) will be on grid lines going to the corners of the hexagon, and the valley folds will be one grid spacing above the mountains on the right-hand side of the paper. To fold the twist, set up both the mountain and valley folds of one pleat; then pass that pleat counterclockwise into your other hand before setting up both folds of the next pleat. Keep all pleats folded and the center of the paper elevated as you work your way around the center, eventually folding all six pleats (use your table to keep the pleats folded, or use clips at the edge of the paper) and forming a hexagonal tower in the center of the paper. Make the pleats more flat, working from the edges in, until this hexagon tower is two grid spacings high. Then grab the tower and give it a sharp counterclockwise twist to get it to lie flat. This twist almost never lies down completely flat right away, so lift each pleat slightly to make sure the valley folds have stayed on grid lines to help the central hexagon to smooth out.

Once the hexagon has been folded, flip the paper over to the printed side. Take the mountain fold of one pleat and split it into a three-way intersection of mountain folds evenly spaced around a point two grid spacings out from the closed hexagon hole. This point is the center of the closed triangle twist, which can be squashed to create the triangle of off-grid creases once the two new pleats are folded over in a clockwise direction (as printed). To squash the triangle twist, press gently on each of the three pleats just outside the point where the valley fold of one pleat contacts the mountain fold of the next pleat. This will start to flatten the central triangle, which can then be pressed from the top to smooth it out and finalize the new creases.

Fold each of the triangle twists in the same way (causing pleats to overlap with pleats from other triangles), in a counterclockwise order around the central hexagon (this order makes the overlapping pleats easier to work with later).

Once the triangles have all been folded, find a place where two pleats from triangle twists are overlapping and open up the overlap so you can see all the parts of the paper (leaving the triangle twists folded). Use the printed folds to set up a rhombus twist, and then press the twist flat from the top once all the folds in the pleats are set up.

Repeat this step with all six of the pleat overlaps (if you followed the recommended sequence for the triangles, only one overlap will be in a different order from the rest) to complete the pattern.

Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry.

Millions of us use chatbots every day, even though we don’t really know how they work or how using them affects us. In a bid to address this, the FTC recently launched an inquiry into how chatbots affect children and teenagers. Elsewhere, OpenAI has started to shed more light on what people are actually using ChatGPT for, and why it thinks its LLMs are so prone to making stuff up.

There’s still plenty we don’t know—but that isn’t stopping governments from forging ahead with AI projects. In the US, RFK Jr. is pushing his staffers to use ChatGPT, while Albania is using a chatbot for public contract procurement. Proceed with caution.