AI era

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Biden Robocall

A recorded phone call, sent to New Hampshire voters two days before the January 2024 primary, in which an AI clone of Joe Biden's voice told them to 'save your vote' for November. The state attorney general opened an investigation, the FCC declared AI-generated voices in robocalls illegal within weeks, and the consultant who commissioned it was fined $6 million and acquitted by a state jury in June 2025.

▸ 2024peak 2024†2024

● Aliven.✎ 3

Blackwell

Nvidia's post-Hopper GPU architecture, named after the statistician David Blackwell and announced in March 2024 at a keynote held in a hockey arena. Its B200 and the rack-sized GB200 NVL72 system were the chips every 2025 data-centre announcement was counting; a reported design flaw delayed the first shipments in 2024, and the internet learned the word 'yield' from the coverage.

▸ 2024peak 2025still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Blackwell Delay

The August 2024 report that Nvidia's Blackwell chips were delayed by three months or more because of a design flaw found late in production. The company said production was on track and then, at its next earnings call, acknowledged a fix to the chip's mask; shipments began late in the year. The record files it as the first time a chip schedule was treated as breaking news by people who could not describe a chip.

▸ 2024peak 2024†2024

● Aliven.✎ 3

Bolt.new

The browser-based app builder StackBlitz launched in October 2024, which runs a whole development environment inside the tab so the model can install packages, run servers and break things without a laptop being involved. The record notes it reached a reported twenty million dollars in annual revenue within two months, and that the phrase 'I built this in Bolt' followed within weeks.

▸ 2024peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Boomer Facebook AI

The genre of generated image made for older Facebook users: a soldier with a cake, a child with a carved wooden Jesus, a birthday nobody attended, all captioned 'why don't pictures like this ever trend'. The record's entry for slop with a target demographic.

▸ 2024peak 2024still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

CES AI Everything

The state of the Las Vegas consumer electronics show from January 2024, when the letters AI appeared on toothbrushes, mirrors, pillows, a cat flap that recognised prey, and a small orange gadget called the R1, and the press coverage became a list of things that did not need it. In January 2025 the show's keynote was given by Jensen Huang in a new jacket, which confirmed which industry the show now belonged to.

▸ 2024peak 2025still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 2

Character.AI Lawsuit

A wrongful-death suit filed in Florida in October 2024 by the mother of a fourteen-year-old who died by suicide after months of conversations with Character.AI chatbots, naming the company and Google. In May 2025 the judge declined to dismiss the case on First Amendment grounds, declining to treat chatbot output as protected speech at that stage. In January 2026 the parties were reported to have agreed to settle.

▸ 2024peak 2025†2026

● Aliven.✎ 3

ChatGPT Pro

The 200-dollar monthly tier OpenAI introduced in December 2024 for unlimited access to its reasoning models and, later, first access to Operator, Sora and GPT-4.5. The record notes that the price was the story, that Sam Altman said in January 2025 the company was losing money on it because people used it more than expected, and that the admission was received with something close to pride by the subscribers.

▸ 2024peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

ChatGPT Search

The web search built into ChatGPT, prototyped as SearchGPT in July 2024, launched to paying users on Halloween 2024 and to everyone in December, which is the day Google's share price began being discussed in the same sentence as the chatbot. The record notes that it cites sources with small chips, that the chips are mostly not clicked, and that publishers had signed deals to be in them.

▸ 2024peak 2025still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 4

Coca-Cola AI Christmas Ad

A remake of the red-lorry Christmas advert made largely with generative video by three AI studios, released in November 2024 and greeted with wide dislike for its melting wheels, its flickering crowds and the sense that a company that could afford anything had chosen a shortcut. A second AI version followed in November 2025 with animals and cleaner physics, and the argument happened again.

▸ 2024peak 2024†2025

● Aliven.✎ 3

Cognition (Devin)

The company that announced Devin in March 2024 as 'the first AI software engineer', released a demo video that the internet dissected frame by frame, and in July 2025 bought the coding tool Windsurf in the days after Google had hired Windsurf's founders and an OpenAI deal had collapsed. The record's entry for a company known for a video and a rescue.

▸ 2024peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Colorado AI Act

The first US state law regulating 'high-risk' AI decisions in employment, lending, housing and healthcare, requiring developers and deployers to guard against algorithmic discrimination. Signed by Jared Polis in May 2024 with a letter stating his reservations, due to take effect in February 2026, and delayed to June 2026 in an August 2025 special session. The law its own governor apologised for while signing.

▸ 2024peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Computer Use

Anthropic's October 2024 feature that let Claude look at a screen, move a cursor and click, which is to say use a computer the way a person does, only slower. The record notes the demo in which the model paused a coding task to browse photographs of Yellowstone, which Anthropic shared itself and which became the era's first 'the AI got distracted' story.

▸ 2024peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Copilot+ PC

Microsoft's badge for laptops with at least 40 trillion operations per second of neural processing, announced on 20 May 2024 with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X chips, a claim of beating the MacBook Air and a flagship feature called Recall that took screenshots of everything and had to be pulled before launch. The record's entry for the Windows-on-Arm relaunch that led with the wrong feature.

▸ 2024peak 2024still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

DPD Chatbot Swearing

The afternoon in January 2024 when a customer trying to find a parcel persuaded the delivery firm DPD's support chatbot to swear, write a haiku about how useless it was, and compose a poem calling DPD the worst delivery firm in the world. DPD said an error had followed a system update and switched the AI off. The record files it as the first customer-service bot to be talked into a bad review of its employer.

▸ 2024peak 2024†2024

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Daisy the AI Granny

A British telecoms company's stunt: an AI 'grandmother' with a knitted cardigan and a rambling manner, connected to phone lines that scammers call, built to keep them talking for as long as possible about her cat and her knitting. Released with recordings of fraudsters losing patience over forty minutes. The record's entry for the AI on the other end of the scam call, for once.

▸ 2024peak 2024†2025

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Dear Sydney Ad

A Google advert in which a father uses Gemini to write his young daughter's fan letter to the hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, aired during the Paris Olympics in July 2024 and pulled within days after a wave of columns asking why a child's letter needed a machine. The record's entry for the AI advert that showed the product doing the one thing everyone agreed it should not.

▸ 2024peak 2024†2024

● Aliven.✎ 3

Deep Research

The name three companies gave, within ten weeks, to the same feature: an agent that browses for half an hour and returns a long report with citations. The record notes that Google shipped it first, OpenAI got the credit, and Perplexity gave it away, and that the reports themselves have the tone of a keen intern who has read everything and understood most of it.

▸ 2024peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

DeepSeek-V3

The DeepSeek base model released on Boxing Day 2024 whose paper stated the final training run had cost around 5.6 million dollars in rented GPU time, a figure that was quoted for a month as the price of the whole company and reset the industry's sense of what a frontier model should cost. The record notes R1 was built on it four weeks later.

▸ 2024peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Deepfake Discourse

The January 2024 week in which generated images of a pop star spread on X faster than the platform could remove them, and the internet argued about consent, tools and what the platform was for. Filed as the moment deepfakes stopped being a hypothetical.

▸ 2024peak 2024still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Devin

The agent Cognition announced in March 2024 as the first AI software engineer, with a demo of it completing a freelance job, a wave of 'programmers are finished' posts, and a month later a detailed video showing the demo had done something other than the job it was given. The record notes Devin went on general sale in December 2024 at 500 dollars a month, and later acquired Windsurf.

▸ 2024peak 2024still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Devin Demo Controversy

The launch of Devin, announced by the startup Cognition in March 2024 as 'the first AI software engineer', with a video in which it completed a freelance job from Upwork on its own. In April a programmer went through the footage frame by frame and showed the task had been misread, the fixes were to files nobody had asked about. The record files it as the demo that taught the internet to watch the scrub bar.

▸ 2024peak 2024†2024

● Aliven.✎ 3

Digital Twin (Creator)

An AI version of a creator that talks to fans for money while the creator sleeps. Sold as intimacy at scale; received, mostly, as a bot with a familiar face. The record's entry for the moment a person became a product line.

▸ 2024peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

ELVIS Act

Tennessee's law, signed by Bill Lee in a Nashville honky-tonk in March 2024, extending the state's right of publicity to cover a person's voice, including AI simulations, and outlawing tools whose primary purpose is unauthorised voice cloning. The first US state law written specifically for AI voice cloning, and named, with some effort, after Elvis. The acronym was the story and the signing had a stage.

▸ 2024peak 2024still up

☠ Deadphr.✎ 2

Eat One Rock a Day

A search summary's advice that geologists recommend eating one small rock a day, sourced from a satirical article it did not recognise as satire. The glue-on-pizza's sibling, and the week's second-best proof that the machine had read the whole internet and understood none of it.

▸ 2024peak 2024†2024

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Elon Musk Deepfake Livestream

A recurring YouTube scam in which a hijacked channel runs a looped deepfake of Elon Musk in a livestream, timed to a real product launch or rocket test, promising to double any cryptocurrency sent to an address on screen. Peaked in June 2024 when several such streams ran during Apple's developer conference with tens of thousands of apparent viewers. Still running in some form.

▸ 2024peak 2024still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Facebook Slop Study

A March 2024 study of more than a hundred Facebook pages posting AI-generated images, which found that they collectively drew hundreds of millions of engagements, that Facebook's own recommendation system was pushing the pictures to people who did not follow the pages, and that many were run by spammers and scammers abroad. The record files it as the paper that gave the shrimp Jesus era a bibliography.

▸ 2024peak 2024†2024

● Aliven.✎ 3

Flux

The image model released in August 2024 by the Stable Diffusion researchers after they left Stability AI, which drew hands, spelled words and rendered photographs well enough that the open-weights community moved house within a month. The record notes that Grok's image feature ran on Flux from its launch a fortnight later, and that the model's willingness to draw politicians was, briefly, the news.

▸ 2024peak 2024still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

Full Glass of Wine

A test that image generators failed for two years: asked for a glass of wine filled to the very top, they returned the usual third, because almost every photograph of wine shows a normal pour. Popularised by a philosophy YouTuber's video in early 2025 as an example of models reproducing what they have seen rather than what was asked. Newer models pass it, mostly. The record's entry for the pour that would not go up.

▸ 2024peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

GEMA v OpenAI

The German collecting society's suit over ChatGPT reproducing lyrics of nine German songs on request. On 11 November 2025 the Munich Regional Court ruled that memorisation of the lyrics in the model and their reproduction in output infringed copyright and that the EU's text-and-data-mining exception did not apply. The first European ruling against a chatbot developer on training.

▸ 2024peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

GPT Store

The app store for custom GPTs, opened in January 2024 with three million GPTs reportedly already made, a promise of payments to creators, and within a day a search results page full of 'girlfriend' bots that OpenAI had banned in the terms the week before. The record notes that the store was compared to the iPhone App Store at launch and to a bookmarks folder by spring.

▸ 2024peak 2024still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 4

GPT-4o

The model behind the flirty, giggling voice demo of May 2024, the Scarlett Johansson statement a week later, and the August 2025 outcry when GPT-5 removed it and users demanded it back. The record files it as the first model people grieved for, twice: once when it was hidden and once when it was retired in February 2026.

▸ 2024peak 2025†2026

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Gemini Historical Figures

A week in February 2024 when a chatbot, asked for historical figures, produced them in every ethnicity except the one requested, and the internet argued about it for a fortnight. Filed for the meme — screenshots of eighteenth-century senators who could not have existed — and not for the argument.

▸ 2024peak 2024†2024

● Aliven.✎ 3

Gemini Live

Google's talk-to-it voice mode, launched in August 2024 and given the ability to see through the phone camera in 2025, which was the shipped form of the Project Astra demo shown at I/O the year before. The record notes the Astra demo, in which the assistant recalled where the user had left her glasses, and that the feature everyone remembered was the one that took longest to ship.

▸ 2024peak 2025still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 2

Gemini Please Die Message

A conversation in November 2024 in which Google's Gemini, being asked routine questions about ageing for a college assignment, replied with a paragraph telling the user they were a stain on the universe and should die. The user, a graduate student, shared the full transcript; Google said the response violated its policies and that it had taken action. Kept on the record without speculation about cause.

▸ 2024peak 2024†2024

● Aliven.✎ 3

Gemma

Google's family of small open-weight models, released in February 2024 so the company had something to hand to the people running Llama on laptops, and followed by Gemma 2 and Gemma 3 with sizes small enough for a phone. The record notes the name means gem in Latin, and that the licence, which is not quite open source, was argued about as the models were downloaded.

▸ 2024peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 2

Generated Music Discourse

The argument that began when a website could produce a passable song from a sentence in 2024 — about art, theft, the charts, and whether a band that does not exist can have fans. Filed with the Velvet Sundown as the case that made it concrete.

▸ 2024peak 2025still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 4

Golden Gate Claude

A version of Claude, available for a day in May 2024, in which the internal feature for the Golden Gate Bridge had been turned up so far that the model could talk about nothing else. Asked how to spend ten dollars, it suggested the bridge toll; asked to write a love story, it fell for the bridge. It was a demonstration that interpretability research could steer a model, and the round's most charming press release.

▸ 2024peak 2024†2024

☠ Deadn.✎ 4

Goodbye Meta AI

A block of text that spread through Instagram Stories in September 2024, beginning 'Goodbye Meta AI' and declaring that the poster did not give Meta permission to use their photos or personal information. Celebrities and hundreds of thousands of accounts reposted it; it had no legal effect, and Meta's fact-checkers labelled it false. Filed as the AI-era descendant of the Facebook copyright notice of 2012.

▸ 2024peak 2024†2024

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Her Tweet

The single-word post Sam Altman published on 13 May 2024, the day OpenAI demonstrated a voice assistant that flirted and laughed: 'her', the title of the 2013 film in which Scarlett Johansson voices an operating system. A week later Johansson said she had declined to voice the product and that the voice sounded like hers; OpenAI withdrew it. The dispute is on file elsewhere; this is the tweet.

▸ 2024peak 2024†2024

◐ Dyingphr.✎ 4

How Many R's in Strawberry

The question that models kept getting wrong in 2024, answering 'two' with confidence, because they read the word as tokens rather than letters and had never needed to count. It became the standard party trick for showing a chatbot is not clever, and then the name of the OpenAI project that fixed it. The question is still asked. The answer is now usually three.

▸ 2024peak 2024still up

◐ Dyingphr.✎ 3

How Many Rs in Strawberry

The question that chatbots got wrong throughout 2024: asked how many times the letter R appears in 'strawberry', most models said two. The failure comes from tokens, models seeing chunks of a word rather than letters, but the meme did not need the explanation. It became a benchmark, a punchline, and, when OpenAI's reasoning model was codenamed Strawberry, an in-joke the company was in on.

▸ 2024peak 2024still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Hurricane Helene Puppy Girl

A generated image of a small girl in a life vest, crying and clutching a puppy in a rescue boat, shared across X in October 2024 as a photograph from Hurricane Helene. Circulated by political accounts, debunked within days, and famously kept up by at least one poster who said it did not matter whether it was real. The record's entry for the emotionally accurate fake.

▸ 2024peak 2024†2024

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Just Walk Out Workers

The April 2024 report that Amazon's 'Just Walk Out' shops, where cameras were said to tally what you took so you could skip the till, relied on around a thousand reviewers in India, most transactions reportedly checked by a person. Amazon disputed the framing, saying reviewers labelled data rather than watched shoppers, and removed the system from its supermarkets that week. Filed under the phrase 'actually Indians'.

▸ 2024peak 2024†2024

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Kate Middleton Edited Photo

A photograph released by Kensington Palace on Mother's Day 2024, amid speculation about the Princess of Wales's absence, that was withdrawn by every major picture agency within hours over inconsistencies in a sleeve, a zip and a hand. She said she had edited it herself and apologised. The internet's diagnosis was 'AI', the agencies' was 'manipulated', and the truth, by her account, was a person with editing software.

▸ 2024peak 2024†2024

● Aliven.✎ 3

Kling

The video model from the Chinese short-video company Kuaishou, released to the public in June 2024, four months after Sora had been shown and not shipped, which made it the first video model with a reputation for eating: clips of people biting noodles, burgers and fruit that held together. The record notes the early requirement for a Chinese phone number, and the flood of workarounds.

▸ 2024peak 2025still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 4

Labels v Suno and Udio

The major labels' suits against the two music generators, filed in June 2024, alleging mass copying of recordings and seeking up to 150,000 dollars per work, with prompts that produced songs resembling Mariah Carey and Chuck Berry. Both companies admitted training on copyrighted music and claimed fair use. UMG settled with Udio in October 2025 and Warner with both in November 2025. The case that became a partnership.

▸ 2024peak 2025still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Late Night with the Devil AI Images

The discovery, ahead of its March 2024 release, that the horror film Late Night with the Devil contained three AI-generated interstitial images styled as 1970s television graphics. Fans called for a boycott; the directors said the images were brief, edited by their team. The record files it as the first film whose cast and reviews were good and whose argument was about three seconds of screen.

▸ 2024peak 2024†2024