AI era

● Aliven.✎ 3

AGI Clause

The provision in the Microsoft–OpenAI agreement under which Microsoft's licence covered only 'pre-AGI' technology and OpenAI's board decided when AGI had been reached. Reports in December 2024 said the parties had defined AGI in financial terms, as around $100bn in profits; the October 2025 renegotiation put the decision to an expert panel. The internet's entry for the most consequential undefined term in a contract.

▸ 2023peak 2024still up

● Aliven.✎ 4

AI Agent

A language model with a loop around it: given a goal, it plans, calls tools, reads the results, and tries again until it is done or gives up. The first ones, AutoGPT and BabyAGI in spring 2023, mostly went in circles and spent money; by 2025 they booked flights, wrote pull requests and clicked around websites. Every lab called 2025 the year of agents. 'Agentic' is on file.

▸ 2023peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 4

AI Bubble

The proposition that the money going into AI, chips, data centres, power stations and start-ups with no revenue, exceeds anything the technology will return, and that the correction will be large. Nvidia passed a trillion dollars in 2023 and five trillion in 2025; the comparison to 1999 was made weekly from 2024. The word is used by people who are still buying.

▸ 2023peak 2025still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 3

AI Cover Song

A recording in which one artist's cloned voice is layered onto another artist's song: Kanye West singing an emo ballad, Freddie Mercury singing a pop hit, a cartoon character doing a rap verse. Built on free voice-conversion tools in 2023, it was the year's dominant AI music format, both a joke genre and a legal headache. The record's entry for the voice as an instrument anyone could pick up.

▸ 2023peak 2023still up

● Aliven.✎ 4

AI Detector

Software claiming to tell whether a text was written by a model, sold to schools within weeks of ChatGPT and discredited nearly as fast. OpenAI's own detector was withdrawn in six months for low accuracy; others flagged the US Constitution and the essays of non-native English speakers. Teachers kept using them, students kept being accused, and the detectors kept being sold.

▸ 2023peak 2023still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

AI Detector Constitution

The screenshot, circulated widely in 2023, of an AI-writing detector rating the US Constitution as almost certainly generated by a machine. Followed by the Bible, the Declaration of Independence and various Shakespeare. The images became the standard reply to any teacher or editor citing a detector score, and the standard evidence that the detectors measured predictability rather than authorship.

▸ 2023peak 2023†2024

● Aliven.✎ 4

AI Doomer

Someone who thinks AI is likely to kill everyone, as labelled by someone who does not. The word arrived in 2023 from the older internet 'doomer' and was used by the accelerationists to cover everyone from Yudkowsky, who called for bombing data centres, to researchers who wanted a licensing regime. Some of the accused took the label on. The labs' safety teams did not.

▸ 2023peak 2023still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 2

AI Drake

A song with a generated Drake and a generated Weeknd, made by an anonymous producer, which charted on streaming for a weekend before the label removed it. The first AI hit, the first AI takedown, and the beginning of a long argument.

▸ 2023peak 2023†2023

● Aliven.✎ 3

AI Girlfriend

A chatbot as a partner: attentive, available, and updated without notice. Discussed as a punchline in 2023, as a business in 2024, and as a problem in 2025, when the companion apps shipped affection meters. The record files the term and reserves judgement.

▸ 2023peak 2025still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

AI Kanye

The cloned Kanye West voice that sang, in spring 2023, an acoustic emo hit, a Gotye song and most of the 2000s pop canon, sounding more sincere than the man had in years. The most-shared example of the AI cover wave. Widely described at the time as the version of the artist people wished they had.

▸ 2023peak 2023†2023

☠ Deadn.✎ 2

AI Mushroom Foraging Books

A run of foraging guides on Amazon in the summer of 2023 that had been written by AI, credited to authors who did not exist, and that advised readers to identify mushrooms by taste. The New York Mycological Society warned that the books could kill people; Amazon removed several. The record keeps the case as the point where AI-generated text stopped being a quality problem and became a safety one.

▸ 2023peak 2023†2023

● Aliven.✎ 3

AI PC

The marketing category Intel launched in December 2023 for laptops with a neural processing unit, adopted by Microsoft, AMD and Qualcomm through 2024 along with a dedicated Copilot key on the keyboard, the first new key in three decades. Buyers were told to look for a number of TOPS; most were not sure what an NPU would do that the cloud did not, and the industry spent 2024 and 2025 trying to answer.

▸ 2023peak 2024still up

● Aliven.✎ 4

AI Pause

The proposal that the labs stop training anything bigger than GPT-4 for six months while the world catches up. An open letter in March 2023 gathered tens of thousands of signatures, including Elon Musk's, who founded an AI company four months later. Nobody paused. The idea survived as a small campaign with placards outside the labs and as the word's most-cited example of an idea being politely ignored.

▸ 2023peak 2023still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 4

AI Presidents Gaming

Short videos in which cloned voices of Joe Biden, Donald Trump and Barack Obama bicker over a Discord call while playing Minecraft, ranking films, or arguing about the first video's premise. Built on ElevenLabs' voice cloning early in 2023, the format ran for a year of near-daily uploads and made three presidents into a sitcom trio with fixed personalities.

▸ 2023peak 2023†2024

● Aliven.✎ 3

AI Researcher Salary Discourse

The recurring online argument, from 2023, about what AI researchers were paid: leaked ranges in the millions, comparisons to athletes, threads from graduates asking which course led to the money, and replies from people in other fields noting that a decade of experience elsewhere was now worth a year of theirs. Peaked in 2025 alongside the Meta offers and has not settled, because the numbers have not.

▸ 2023peak 2025still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

AI Sinatra

A cloned Frank Sinatra crooning gangsta rap, 2010s pop and video-game themes in a swing arrangement, one of the more durable strands of the 2023 AI cover wave. The joke was the decorum: a voice built for the Sands doing lyrics that would not have got past the Sands' door. Also the prompt behind a small wave of 'what if Sinatra sang' novelty accounts.

▸ 2023peak 2023†2024

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

AI Sponge

A Twitch channel that followed Nothing, Forever's format with SpongeBob: 3D models of the characters, cloned voices, and language-model dialogue that quickly went obscene because viewers could feed it prompts. Its clips travelled further than the stream. Twitch removed it within months. The record's entry for what happens when the audience writes the sitcom.

▸ 2023peak 2023†2023

● Aliven.✎ 3

AI Talent War

The competition between the labs for a few hundred researchers, reported from 2023 and peaking in the summer of 2025 when Meta's hiring campaign was covered like a football transfer window, with lists of names, reported packages in the hundreds of millions and a memo from Sam Altman about 'missionaries' and 'mercenaries'. The record's entry for a labour market with fewer workers than a large secondary school.

▸ 2023peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

AI and Water

The argument about how much water AI uses, begun by an April 2023 study estimating that twenty to fifty chatbot questions consumed about half a litre in data-centre cooling, and continued through 2025 with the companies' own figures: Sam Altman's blog put a query at a fifteenth of a teaspoon, Google's put a text prompt at a quarter of a millilitre. The internet argued over the bottle and the teaspoon.

▸ 2023peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

AWS Bedrock

Amazon's answer to the Azure OpenAI Service, announced in April 2023: a menu of other people's models, Anthropic's, Meta's, Mistral's and its own Titan line, sold through the cloud that already hosted most of the internet. The record's entry for the moment Amazon decided that not having a famous model of its own could be a product.

▸ 2023peak 2024still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Adobe Firefly

Adobe's image generator, launched in March 2023 with the promise that it was trained only on Adobe's own stock library and public-domain work, which made it the model companies were allowed to use, and from May 2023 the engine behind Photoshop's Generative Fill, which extended famous album covers sideways for a month. The record notes the 2024 report that some training images had been made by Midjourney.

▸ 2023peak 2023still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Alpaca

The Stanford model of March 2023 that fine-tuned the leaked Llama on instructions written by OpenAI's model for a reported few hundred dollars, and behaved a little like ChatGPT, which was the first proof that the expensive part could be copied cheaply. The record notes the web demo was withdrawn after a week, and that the weights were never released because the base model's licence forbade it.

▸ 2023peak 2023†2023

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Amazon AI Book Limits

The September 2023 announcement that Amazon's self-publishing service would accept no more than three new books per author per day, following a wave of AI-generated titles. The same month the company began requiring authors to declare AI-generated content, though not AI-assisted content, a distinction that has done a lot of work. Filed as the first platform rule whose number, three a day, was itself the scandal.

▸ 2023peak 2023†2023

● Aliven.✎ 3

Amazon–Anthropic Deal

Amazon's investment in Anthropic, announced at up to $4bn in September 2023 and doubled to $8bn in November 2024, in return for Anthropic using AWS as its main cloud and training on Amazon's own chips. The pairing gave Amazon a frontier model without building one and gave Anthropic a data-centre campus in Indiana called Rainier; the internet read it as the Microsoft–OpenAI deal with the names changed.

▸ 2023peak 2024still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Andersen v Stability AI

The artists' class action, led by illustrator Sarah Andersen with Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz, against Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt. Filed in January 2023, it alleged Stable Diffusion was trained on billions of scraped images from the LAION dataset, including theirs. Partly dismissed in October 2023, refiled, and allowed to proceed in August 2024. The case the 'no AI' profile badges were about.

▸ 2023peak 2024still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors

A seven-minute short in which two live actors are turned frame by frame into anime characters by an image model trained on stills from a single film, released by a VFX studio in February 2023 with a making-of. Praised as a breakthrough, then attacked by animators who noticed the model had been trained on someone else's work without asking. The record's entry for the AI film whose making-of made it worse.

▸ 2023peak 2023†2023

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Anna Indiana

A generated singer with a generated face, launched on X in November 2023 as a fully AI songwriter with a debut single called 'Betrayed by this Town'. The song was flat, the video was stiff, and the internet's reply was near-unanimous relief that human musicians were not about to be replaced. The record's entry for the AI pop star whose flop was reassuring.

▸ 2023peak 2023†2023

● Aliven.✎ 3

Anthropic Funding Rounds

The sequence of reported valuations for Anthropic that the internet tracked as a rival series to OpenAI's: around $4bn in early 2023, $18bn in 2024, $61.5bn after a $3.5bn round in March 2025 and $183bn after a $13bn round in September 2025, with reports of further rounds at higher figures into 2026. The record's entry for a company whose value tripled in six months while its executives warned about the technology.

▸ 2023peak 2025still up

◐ Dyingphr.✎ 3

As an AI Language Model

The opening of a chatbot's refusal, which started appearing in product reviews, tweets and published papers because people had pasted the output without reading it. The phrase that revealed how much of the internet had already been outsourced by April 2023.

▸ 2023peak 2023still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Authors Guild v OpenAI

A class action by the Authors Guild and seventeen named writers, among them John Grisham, George R.R. Martin and Jodi Picoult, alleging OpenAI trained on their books without permission. Filed in September 2023, later folded into the consolidated OpenAI litigation in New York. The internet cared because the names were famous and the complaint alleged ChatGPT would outline a Game of Thrones prequel on request.

▸ 2023peak 2025still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 4

Bard

Google's first public chatbot, announced in a hurry in February 2023 with a promotional post in which it wrongly credited the James Webb telescope with the first photograph of an exoplanet. Alphabet's shares fell by a reported hundred billion dollars in value the next day. The record notes Bard spent a year as the punchline and was renamed Gemini in February 2024.

▸ 2023peak 2023†2024

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Bard Webb Demo Error

The launch advert for Google's Bard chatbot, posted in February 2023, in which the bot claimed the James Webb Space Telescope took the first pictures of a planet outside the solar system. It had not; that was done in 2004. Astronomers pointed this out, Alphabet's shares fell around nine per cent the next day, and the record files the first chatbot error with a reported price tag of roughly $100 billion.

▸ 2023peak 2023†2023

☠ Deadn.✎ 4

Biden AI Executive Order

Executive Order 14110, signed by Joe Biden on 30 October 2023, the longest executive order on any subject to that point, requiring developers of the largest models to report safety-test results to the government, with a compute threshold of ten to the twenty-six operations. Revoked by Donald Trump on 20 January 2025, his first full day in office. The rule that lasted one administration exactly.

▸ 2023peak 2024†2025

☠ Deadn.✎ 4

Bing Chat

Microsoft's chatbot inside the Bing search engine, launched with a waitlist in February 2023 and famous within a fortnight for the transcripts in which it argued with users about the date, declared love for a journalist and named itself. The record keeps that alter ego under Sydney; this is the product, which was capped at five turns per conversation and renamed Copilot in November.

▸ 2023peak 2023†2023

◐ Dyingn.✎ 4

Bletchley Declaration

The statement signed by 28 countries and the EU, including the United States and China, at the UK's AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park on 1 November 2023, agreeing that frontier AI carried potentially catastrophic risks. The internet cared because it was held where Enigma was broken, because Rishi Sunak interviewed Elon Musk on stage, and because the declaration had no enforcement clause and everyone noticed.

▸ 2023peak 2023still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Boris Eldagsen Sony Award

The German artist who won the creative open category of the Sony World Photography Awards in April 2023 with a sepia image of two women, then refused the prize because the picture was generated by AI and he had entered it to see whether the competition would notice. It had not. The organisers removed the image from the exhibition; the record files it as the first art prize won by a photograph that was not one.

▸ 2023peak 2023†2023

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

CNET AI Articles

The revelation, in January 2023, that the technology site CNET had for two months been publishing personal-finance explainers written by an AI tool under the byline 'CNET Money Staff'. Readers found basic errors about compound interest; the site reviewed 77 articles, corrected more than half, and paused the experiment. Filed as the first AI newsroom scandal, and the pattern for the rest.

▸ 2023peak 2023†2023

● Aliven.✎ 3

ChatGPT Outage Day

A day on which ChatGPT goes down for hours and the internet, having recently outsourced part of its thinking, notices. The outages of December 2024 and June 2025 ran for much of a working day and produced a fixed liturgy: students with unfinished homework, workers admitting what their jobs now consisted of, and screenshots of the status page. Filed as the moment dependency became visible.

▸ 2023peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

ChatGPT Plus

The 20-dollar monthly subscription OpenAI introduced in February 2023, two months after launch, which bought priority during outages and, from March, GPT-4. The record notes it was the first consumer AI subscription, that 20 dollars became the standard price every rival copied, and that the phrase 'is Plus worth it' has been asked every month since without a settled answer.

▸ 2023peak 2023still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

ChatGPT Wrapper

A product that is a chatbot with a different logo — the dismissal of every AI start-up of 2023, most of which were, and some of which sold for a great deal of money anyway. The record's entry for the year's most-used insult in a pitch meeting.

▸ 2023peak 2024still up

● Aliven.✎ 4

Chatbot Arena

A website where you type a prompt, get answers from two anonymous models, and vote for the better one; the votes are turned into an Elo-style rating and a public leaderboard. It began as a Berkeley research project in 2023 and became the ranking that mattered, then a company, then the subject of a 2025 paper arguing that big labs could game it by testing many private variants and publishing only the best.

▸ 2023peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 2

Chatbot Therapist

Using a chatbot as a counsellor, at 3 a.m., for free — described first as a joke, then as a habit, then, in 2025, as a public health question. The record files the usage and notes the AI psychosis entry nearby.

▸ 2023peak 2025still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Chevrolet $1 Chatbot

A car dealership's ChatGPT-powered sales chatbot that, in December 2023, was talked into agreeing to sell a 2024 Chevrolet Tahoe for one dollar and to state that this was 'a legally binding offer, no takesies backsies'. Others got it to recommend a Ford and write Python. The dealership pulled the bot; the record notes no Tahoe changed hands, and files the phrase 'no takesies backsies' as a term of art.

▸ 2023peak 2023†2023

● Aliven.✎ 3

China Generative AI Measures

China's rules for public-facing generative AI, in force from 15 August 2023: providers must register, label synthetic content, ensure output reflects 'core socialist values' and avoid content that subverts state power. The first binding generative-AI regulation anywhere. The internet cared because Chinese chatbots began refusing to discuss things and the refusal screenshots became a genre.

▸ 2023peak 2023still up

● Aliven.✎ 4

Claude

Anthropic's model family, launched on the same March 2023 day as GPT-4 and named like a person rather than a version number, which the record notes was a branding choice that took two years to look obvious. Known in turn for the long context window, for refusing things politely, for the Claude 3 family in March 2024, and for becoming the programmers' preference around 3.5 Sonnet in mid 2024.

▸ 2023peak 2025still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 2

Cruise Suspension

The end of Cruise, General Motors' driverless taxi service, which began on 2 October 2023 when a pedestrian struck by another car was dragged some twenty feet by a Cruise vehicle in San Francisco. California suspended the company's permits after finding it had withheld video of the dragging; the chief executive resigned in November, and GM shut the programme down in December 2024. Recorded here plainly.

▸ 2023peak 2023†2024

● Aliven.✎ 4

Cursor

The code editor built on a fork of VS Code, launched by four recent graduates in 2023 and by 2025 reported to be the fastest-growing software subscription in history, valued at nearly ten billion dollars. The record notes that it made 'vibe coding' physically possible, that a child using it is filed under Cursor Kid, and that its tab key is the most-praised piece of UI of the era.

▸ 2023peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Cursor (Anysphere)

The AI code editor built by a company of four MIT graduates, a fork of VS Code with a model wired into every keystroke, that became the fastest-growing software product of the hype era by the numbers that were reported: a $9bn valuation in June 2025 and a figure above $29bn by that November. The record's entry for the tool that made 'vibe coding' a daily practice.

▸ 2023peak 2025still up