In Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, the anxious Colonel Cathcart is in the habit of compiling little lists of recent events. He draws these lists up under two headings: “Black Eyes” and “Feathers In My Cap.” Into the former, he puts everything that seems to damage his chances of preferment – bombing his own runway again, and so forth – and in the latter, everything that will redound to his credit.

I like to imagine Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, and his fellow AI overlords doing something similar. In the “Black Eyes” column, we might find near the top of the list the original sin of generative AI. Despite the efforts to handwave it away as a bygone, none of these models would exist at all were it not for the wholesale theft of the intellectual property of almost every writer or artist on earth. Consumer AI, pretty much all of it, is the fruit of a poisoned tree.

But there are plenty of black eyes in the outcomes, too. To list a few: the poisoning of the information ecosystem and the concomitant political destabilisation; the vast expansion of surveillance possibilities for totalitarian regimes; the effective dismantling of secondary and higher education and the cognitive prospects of an entire generation; enabling financial fraud and the cost-free production of child sexual abuse material at scale; the prospect of transferring state-level capacity in bioweapons and cyberweapons to........

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