What the AI Chatbot Discourse Is Really Revealing

The biggest tech story of the year is shaping up around the seemingly sudden arrival of AI chatbots into mainstream attention: piggybacking off last year's viral reception to text-to-image generators like DALL-E 2, the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT in November has since spurred not only widespread media coverage and netizen adoption, but also an industry-wide arms race. Whatever polite corporate doffing made to AI's thicket of ethical ramifications over the past few decades disintegrated nearly overnight in favor of Silicon Valley's primal fear of competition, and we now live in a society where Microsoft's newly AI-powered Bing ("Sydney," to her friends), Google's Bard, Meta's LLaMA, and Snapchat's My AI (which at least allows you the dignity of naming your chatbot yourself) seem poised to transform us all. The AI future feels nigh, if not terribly optimistic. In an era where major breakthroughs in tech render either inscrutable--admit it, you still don't know what a blockchain is, do you?--or We're kind of used to it already: After spending the greater part of Web 2.0 accepting the sleight of hand that invisible, algorithmic forces exert on our day-to-day, the consumer-friendly AI-powered machinations of driverless cars and actually efficient task assistants and decent predictive-text features has become a foregone conclusion.