It’s an exciting time at the cutting edge of AI research. Massive companies are spending tens of billions of dollars to build, train, and deploy new AI models with which they hope to automate a wide range of tasks currently relegated to thinking humans. Researchers are considering questions about whether, and how, computers can reason or what it might mean for software to be meaningfully intelligent. It’s interesting and sometimes bracing stuff, and you really get the feeling, talking to people in the industry, that some of them feel as though they’re not just building the future but manifesting destiny, which is the sort of belief that might lead one to start telling eager customers to show “gratitude”:

how about a couple of weeks of gratitude for magic intelligence in the sky, and then you can have more toys soon?

While the future of AI is the subject of vigorous, stimulating, and productive debate, the rest of us on the internet, a few miles downstream from research labs, are confronting AI-related questions of our own, about the present and recent past. Questions like Is that image AI, or is it just sort of ugly? Is my student’s essay AI-generated, or is it just repetitive, low effort, and full of clichés? Is this menu AI, or is the food just kind of disgusting? Is this photo AI, or is her face just that symmetrical? Is this book AI, or was it just written by a cheap ghostwriter? (Or both?) Is that post from a stranger on social-media AI, or are people really just that dull? Is this email AI, or has my co-worker started taking lots of Adderall?

In the two years since the launch of ChatGPT, the general public’s dazzling introduction to generative AI, the tech industry has managed to keep the discourse in the future tense: New capabilities are imminent; new models are coming; today’s AI tools are the worst you’ll ever........

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