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?

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.