In 2023, calling someone an “AI” has become a hurtful insult, and not even celebrities or public figures are safe from such jokes. The trend is evident on social media, where tweets levying insults against various forms of media, from TV shows and songs to commencement speeches and proposed legislations, abound. This phenomenon is a result of the significant moment for AI we’re in, where chatbots have taken off and can mimic human language with impressive precision. However, compared to human-generated work, much of what the chatbot spits out is uninspired, riddled with cliches and recycled ideas. As such, asking “did a chatbot write this?” is no longer a compliment; it’s a diss.
According to Frank Lantz, director of the Game Center at New York University, and a writer focusing on making sense of AI, this trend is a funny insult. Lantz positioned the dig as part of the larger arc of AI in pop culture, where robots were usually portrayed as both smart and dumb, struggling to understand human emotions. Today, bots no longer primarily live on servers in some distant researcher’s lab; they’re right in front of us, just one browser window away. Therefore, when bots sound like they’re posting on LinkedIn all the time, it’s a different kind of soullessness.
Part of why “AI” is an insult is that we’re in the middle of an AI hype cycle, where every company is trying to stuff anything and everything into a chatbot. These jokes serve to ground us in the technology’s present-day abilities. AI is seen as an incompetent tool that can take jobs not because it’s competent, but because it will allow companies to justify degrading their position, paying them less, offering fewer benefits, and turning them into contractors.
However, Janelle Shane, who runs the blog AI Weirdness, sees humor as a leveling force, bringing discourse back to the level of “no, no, these things are incompetent.” Over time, AI might get the last laugh as it becomes indistinguishable from the work of real humans. Meanwhile, the insult’s familiarity verges on bot-like itself, turning into a bad version of AI that can take jobs.
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