If you want to really hurt someone's feelings in the year 2023, just call them an AI. An all-star cast of celebrities and public figures have recently been the victim of such jokes: the NBA player Jordan Poole ("AI Steph Curry"), Raquel Leviss from the reality-TV show Vanderpump Rules ("what would happen if you asked chat GBT [sic] to create an American girl"), Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg ("our first A.I. cabinet member?"). That these slights span the three pillars of American life--sports, politics, Bravo--suggests that no one, or rather nothing, is safe. Such digs have popped up all over social media; on Twitter alone, insults like these have been levied against TV shows, songs, sports uniforms, commencement speeches, White House press releases, proposed legislation, and lots of news articles. That AI has become an attack is a result of the huge moment for AI we're in.

AI can do a lot of things extremely well. One thing that it can do just okay -- which, frankly, is still quite extraordinary -- is write college term papers. That's the finding from EduRef, a resource for students and educators, which ran an experiment to determine if a deep learning language prediction model known as GPT-3 could get passing marks in an anonymized trial. Everything you need to know about OpenAI's breakthrough AI language program "We hired a panel of professors to create a writing prompt, gave it to a group of recent grads and undergraduate-level writers, and fed it to GPT-3 and had the panel grade the anonymous submissions and complete a follow up survey for thoughts about the writers," according to an EduRef post. The results were a surprising demonstration of the natural-language prowess of AI.