We, Robots

Since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3.5 large-language model (LLM) in November 2022, AI has been all over the news. Media coverage typically communicates the same message: AI is smart and getting smarter. Sometimes stories hype its growing intelligence as ushering in a future utopia, and sometimes they warn against it as leading to doom, à la Skynet. In fact, the hype and doom are two sides of the same “criti-hype” coin, to borrow Lee Vinsel’s term, both conveying that AI will become smarter than human beings.