AI was supposed to be the shiny centrepiece of the new American tech revolution - until it wasn’t.

This week US tech giants took an existential hammering, seeing a trillion dollars wiped off their market value. The absurdly valuable Nvidia lost $600 billion all on its own. The AI sector is now in a state of freefall.

OpenAI and its ChatGPT model have had hundreds of millions of dollars invested in its development. It can begin to feel like meaningless large numbers attached to these things. It might as well be.

Because China has made a bombastic entry in the race with DeepSeek, an efficient free-use generative AI model with a paltry supposed development of $6 million. The bloated and overvalued US tech sector is tumbling from this unexpected lean visitor.

This film veteran was stunned when he asked AI to give him ideas

So curiously, I asked the market-wrecking DeepSeek to write an opinion column about AI in the style of Derek McArthur from The Herald. This column has plenty of text data for it to feed from by this point, and I’ve written about AI and its effects on arts and culture multiple times in the past, so it should get pretty close to the real thing, right?

The results were interesting, but not in what it got right about my thoughts on AI and the way........

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