448 born · 233 peaked · 158 died
Born in 2023 448
- ◐5 to 9 Before 9 to 5The video genre of doing a full day — gym, skincare, breakfast, a walk — between five and…
- ●AGI ClauseThe provision in the Microsoft–OpenAI agreement under which Microsoft's licence covered o…
- ●AI AgentA language model with a loop around it: given a goal, it plans, calls tools, reads the re…
- ●AI BubbleThe proposition that the money going into AI, chips, data centres, power stations and sta…
- ◐AI Cover SongA recording in which one artist's cloned voice is layered onto another artist's song: Kan…
- ●AI DetectorSoftware claiming to tell whether a text was written by a model, sold to schools within w…
- ☠AI Detector ConstitutionThe screenshot, circulated widely in 2023, of an AI-writing detector rating the US Consti…
- ●AI DoomerSomeone who thinks AI is likely to kill everyone, as labelled by someone who does not. Th…
- ☠AI DrakeA song with a generated Drake and a generated Weeknd, made by an anonymous producer, whic…
- ●AI GirlfriendA chatbot as a partner: attentive, available, and updated without notice. Discussed as a …
- ☠AI KanyeThe cloned Kanye West voice that sang, in spring 2023, an acoustic emo hit, a Gotye song …
- ☠AI Mushroom Foraging BooksA run of foraging guides on Amazon in the summer of 2023 that had been written by AI, cre…
- ●AI PCThe marketing category Intel launched in December 2023 for laptops with a neural processi…
- ●AI PauseThe proposal that the labs stop training anything bigger than GPT-4 for six months while …
- ☠AI Presidents GamingShort videos in which cloned voices of Joe Biden, Donald Trump and Barack Obama bicker ov…
- ●AI Researcher Salary DiscourseThe recurring online argument, from 2023, about what AI researchers were paid: leaked ran…
- ☠AI SinatraA cloned Frank Sinatra crooning gangsta rap, 2010s pop and video-game themes in a swing a…
- ☠AI SpongeA Twitch channel that followed Nothing, Forever's format with SpongeBob: 3D models of the…
- ●AI Talent WarThe competition between the labs for a few hundred researchers, reported from 2023 and pe…
- ●AI Voice ScamA phone scam in which a cloned voice — a child, a grandchild, a boss — pleads for urgent …
- ☠AI YearbookThe 1990s American high-school yearbook portrait — feathered hair, varsity jacket, cloudy…
- ●AI and WaterThe argument about how much water AI uses, begun by an April 2023 study estimating that t…
- ●AWS BedrockAmazon's answer to the Azure OpenAI Service, announced in April 2023: a menu of other peo…
- ◐Adidas SambaA 1950s football trainer that became the shoe of 2023–24 — on every street, every influen…
- ●Adobe FireflyAdobe's image generator, launched in March 2023 with the promise that it was trained only…
- ●Airdrop FarmingDoing small tasks on a new platform in the hope of being given something later — the inte…
- ●Alan Wake 2Remedy's 2023 sequel, thirteen years after the first, released digitally only and remembe…
- ●Alex HormoziA business influencer with a nose ring, a beard, and a specific format — big captions, a …
- ☠AlpacaThe Stanford model of March 2023 that fine-tuned the leaked Llama on instructions written…
- ◐Amanda the AdventurerA horror game in which you watch VHS tapes of a children's cartoon whose presenter, Amand…
- ☠Amazon AI Book LimitsThe September 2023 announcement that Amazon's self-publishing service would accept no mor…
- ●Amazon–Anthropic DealAmazon's investment in Anthropic, announced at up to $4bn in September 2023 and doubled t…
- ●Andersen v Stability AIThe artists' class action, led by illustrator Sarah Andersen with Kelly McKernan and Karl…
- ☠Anime Rock, Paper, ScissorsA seven-minute short in which two live actors are turned frame by frame into anime charac…
- ☠Anita Max WynnDrake's gambling alter ego — 'I need a max win' — announced on a stream, printed on a hat…
- ☠Anna IndianaA generated singer with a generated face, launched on X in November 2023 as a fully AI so…
- ●Anthropic Funding RoundsThe sequence of reported valuations for Anthropic that the internet tracked as a rival se…
- ☠ApeFest Eye InjuriesAfter Yuga Labs' ApeFest gathering in Hong Kong in November 2023, dozens of attendees rep…
- ●Arc'teryxA Canadian technical-jacket brand with a bird logo, which became a status symbol in 2023 …
- ◐As an AI Language ModelThe opening of a chatbot's refusal, which started appearing in product reviews, tweets an…
- ☠Attack on Titan FinaleThe end of a series that had been ending since 2021, finally, in November 2023, and the w…
- ●Authors Guild v OpenAIA class action by the Authors Guild and seventeen named writers, among them John Grisham,…
- ☠Baby Gronk Rizzed Up Livvy DunneThe June 2023 phrase — a ten-year-old youth-football prodigy nicknamed 'Baby Gronk' meeti…
- ●Baldur's Gate 3A hundred-hour role-playing game adapted from Dungeons & Dragons, released in August 2023…
- ☠Balenciaga PopeThe Pope in a white puffer jacket, generated. The first AI image that fooled a large numb…
- ◐BalletcoreWrap cardigans, leg warmers, ribbons, and a ballet flat with a satin bow, worn by people …
- ◐Banana CatA cat's face on a banana, crying — the crying-cat meme with a banana body — which became …
- ●Bandit HeelerThe father in Bluey — a cartoon dog who plays every game, never phones it in and occasion…
- ☠BarbenheimerTwo films with nothing in common, watched as a double bill because they opened on the sam…
- ☠Barbie Selfie GeneratorA website that put you on a Barbie poster with a tagline — 'This Barbie is tired' — which…
- ☠BardGoogle's first public chatbot, announced in a hurry in February 2023 with a promotional p…
- ☠Bard Webb Demo ErrorThe launch advert for Google's Bard chatbot, posted in February 2023, in which the bot cl…
- ◐Bare Minimum MondayDoing as little as possible on Mondays, deliberately, to ease into the week. Named in ear…
- ☠Bed RottingStaying in bed all day, rebranded as wellness. Named by TikTok, diagnosed by the newspape…
- ☠Beige FlagA partner's trait that is neither good nor bad, just odd. Two weeks of charming specifics…
- ◐Beige Flag BehaviourA partner's harmless oddity, posted as a 'beige flag' — he narrates the dog's thoughts, s…
- ●Bento GridA layout of boxes of different sizes, like a Japanese lunch tray, which became the design…
- ☠Biden AI Executive OrderExecutive Order 14110, signed by Joe Biden on 30 October 2023, the longest executive orde…
- ☠Bing ChatMicrosoft's chatbot inside the Bing search engine, launched with a waitlist in February 2…
- ◐Bird TestPoint at a bird. If your partner looks, you will last. A relationship test from a 1990s p…
- ●Bitcoin OrdinalsA numbering scheme for individual satoshis, published by the developer Casey Rodarmor in …
- ◐Bitcoin PunksThe ten thousand CryptoPunks images inscribed onto Bitcoin in February 2023, in the earli…
- ◐Black Cat GirlfriendThe aloof, particular, hard-to-win partner — the black cat to the golden retriever — as t…
- ◐Blade BallA Roblox game in which a ball flies at the players and each one must deflect it with a sw…
- ◐Bletchley DeclarationThe statement signed by 28 countries and the EU, including the United States and China, a…
- ☠BloketteBlokecore with a ribbon: a football shirt, a pleated skirt, a bow in the hair. The 2023 f…
- ☠Blueberry Milk NailsA pale, milky blue nail colour, named like a dessert, that was the manicure of summer 202…
- ●Body Count DiscourseThe 2023 obsession, on a certain kind of podcast, with how many people a woman had slept …
- ☠Bold GlamourThe TikTok filter of February 2023 that reshaped the jaw, cheeks and eyes so convincingly…
- ☠Bombastic Side Eye'Bombastic side eye. Criminal offensive side eye.' — a sound of escalating judgement laid…
- ◐BonesmashingHitting your own face with a hammer or a bottle to encourage bone growth — a looksmaxxing…
- ●Boots the House DownEmphatic approval — 'she ate, boots the house down' — from ballroom and drag, where 'boot…
- ☠Boris Eldagsen Sony AwardThe German artist who won the creative open category of the Sony World Photography Awards…
- ●Bottle Job SeasonA whole season of bottling rather than one match: a title challenger that leads for month…
- ☠Boy MathThe retort to girl math: 'boy math is having a 5'11 height and rounding to 6 foot', 'boy …
- ◐Boyfriend AirThe theory that the air in a boyfriend's flat makes your skin worse and your hair flat — …
- ●BrainrotContent optimised past the point of meaning, and the mental state of having consumed it. …
- ●Brazilian PhonkPhonk's faster, louder Brazilian cousin — funk samples, a siren, a beat that sounds like …
- ◐Buckshot RouletteRussian roulette with a shotgun, a dealer with a face, and a set of items, made by one de…
- ☠Buff Peter GriffinPeter Griffin from Family Guy, added to Fortnite as a muscular gym-bro version of himself…
- ☠CNET AI ArticlesThe revelation, in January 2023, that the technology site CNET had for two months been pu…
- ●Call ChannelA Telegram channel whose entire output is coins: a name, a contract address, sometimes a …
- ◐CameramanThe faction in Skibidi Toilet with cameras for heads, who fight the toilets on humanity's…
- ☠Can I Pet That DawgA small boy's urgent question, 'Can I pet that dawg?', from a clip that spread across Tik…
- ◐Canon EventA necessary bad experience that makes you who you are, from a film about multiverse plot …
- ●Canthal TiltThe angle of the corners of the eyes — positive is attractive, negative is not, according…
- ●Carnivore DietEating only meat — steak, eggs, butter, nothing green — as a diet and a personality, popu…
- ●Certainly!The chatbot's favourite first word — 'Certainly! Here is…' — as the tell that a text was …
- ☠Chamoy PickleA large pickle coated in chamoy, wrapped in a fruit roll, with a lollipop inside — a Texa…
- ●Chat, Is This RealAsking the imaginary audience — 'chat' — whether something is real, as if life were a str…
- ●ChatGPT Outage DayA day on which ChatGPT goes down for hours and the internet, having recently outsourced p…
- ●ChatGPT PlusThe 20-dollar monthly subscription OpenAI introduced in February 2023, two months after l…
- ●ChatGPT WrapperA product that is a chatbot with a different logo — the dismissal of every AI start-up of…
- ●Chatbot ArenaA website where you type a prompt, get answers from two anonymous models, and vote for th…
- ●Chatbot TherapistUsing a chatbot as a counsellor, at 3 a.m., for free — described first as a joke, then as…
- ◐ChecksEighty blue check marks in a grid, sold as an $8 open edition in January 2023 by the desi…
- ☠Chevrolet $1 ChatbotA car dealership's ChatGPT-powered sales chatbot that, in December 2023, was talked into …
- ●China Generative AI MeasuresChina's rules for public-facing generative AI, in force from 15 August 2023: providers mu…
- ☠Chipi Chipi Chapa ChapaA cat swaying to a 2003 Chilean children's song, edited in December 2023, which was the s…
- ●ClaudeAnthropic's model family, launched on the same March 2023 day as GPT-4 and named like a p…
- ●Clip FarmingStreaming only to produce moments that will travel. The point at which the live stream be…
- ●Coachella Livestream DiscourseThe April weekend when everyone who is not at the festival watches it from bed and judges…
- ☠Coastal CowgirlCowboy boots on a beach, a straw hat, a bandana, denim shorts — the coastal grandmother's…
- ☠Cocaine BearA film whose entire pitch was its title, about a bear on cocaine, based on a true story a…
- ●Coffee BadgingGoing into the office long enough to badge in, get a coffee and be seen, then leaving to …
- ●Cold PlungeGetting into very cold water on purpose, filming your face, and describing the benefits a…
- ●Connections (NYT)A daily puzzle of sixteen words to be sorted into four groups of four, launched by The Ne…
- ◐Cottage CheeseThe 2023 rehabilitation of cottage cheese from a diet-food punchline to a protein-rich in…
- ◐Cozy CardioWalking on a pad in your living room with a candle lit, a show on, and a nice drink — exe…
- ●Crash OutTo lose composure entirely, often on purpose, often on camera. The verb of 2025, and unli…
- ●Creatine (Wellness)The gym supplement of the 1990s rebranded, around 2023, as a daily wellness scoop for eve…
- ☠Cruise SuspensionThe end of Cruise, General Motors' driverless taxi service, which began on 2 October 2023…
- ◐Crumbl ReviewWeekly videos reviewing a cookie chain's rotating menu, with a scoring system and a speci…
- ☠Cupid (Twin Version)The sped-up, mostly English 'Twin Version' of K-pop rookies FIFTY FIFTY's 'Cupid', releas…
- ●CursorThe code editor built on a fork of VS Code, launched by four recent graduates in 2023 and…
- ●Cursor (Anysphere)The AI code editor built by a company of four MIT graduates, a fork of VS Code with a mod…
- ●Custom GPTsThe feature that let ChatGPT Plus subscribers make their own chatbot by describing it, la…
- ●Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom LibertyCD Projekt's only expansion for Cyberpunk 2077, released in September 2023 with Idris Elb…
- ●CybertruckA stainless-steel wedge that arrived in November 2023 and became, within a year, the inte…
- ☠DALL-E 3The image model OpenAI built into ChatGPT in October 2023, so that you described the pict…
- ●Dark and DarkerA first-person dungeon-crawling extraction game whose free Steam playtests drew over a hu…
- ◐Date-Me DocA Google Doc — several pages, headings, a section on dealbreakers — shared as a dating pr…
- ◐De-influencingInfluencers telling you what not to buy — the Stanley, the Dyson, the blush — which was, …
- ☠DeepMind–Google Brain MergerGoogle's April 2023 decision to fold its two AI research groups, the Mountain View-based …
- ☠DeinfluencingA January 2023 wave of creators telling followers what not to buy — the viral blush, the …
- ◐Delulu Is the Solulu'Delusion is the solution' — the motto of the delulu era: believe it hard enough and it c…
- ●Diablo IVBlizzard's 2023 Diablo, marketed with cathedral choirs and Lilith, which became the compa…
- ●Digital NecromancyBringing back the dead with software: a singer's voice on a new track, an actor's face in…
- ☠Disney Pixar Poster TrendA November 2023 wave of fake animated-film posters in a Pixar style, made with Microsoft'…
- ◐Doom SpendingBuying things to feel better about the news — the retail form of doomscrolling — named in…
- ●DredgeA fishing game with a Lovecraft problem: you sail a small boat, sell the catch and try no…
- ●Dress to ImpressA Roblox game — a theme, five minutes, a runway — that became the fashion contest of a ge…
- ☠Dropbox AI Toggle PanicThe December 2023 discovery that Dropbox accounts had a 'third-party AI' setting switched…
- ◐Drunk GrealishJack Grealish across three days of celebrations after Manchester City's treble in June 20…
- ●DupeA cheaper copy of an expensive thing, bought proudly — the dupe — which went from a secre…
- ●ElevenLabsThe voice cloning and text-to-speech company whose beta opened in January 2023 and was us…
- ☠ElevenLabs 4chan Voice CloningThe week in January 2023 when a new voice-cloning service opened a free beta and 4chan us…
- ☠Elf.TechGrimes's response to the AI cover wave: a public offer, days after the AI Drake song, to …
- ●Emmett ShearThe Twitch co-founder named interim chief executive of OpenAI on the night of Sunday 19 N…
- ☠Eras TourA twenty-one-month tour that moved the economy of every city it visited, produced a film,…
- ●Erewhon SmoothieThe celebrity-branded smoothies sold at Erewhon, the Los Angeles grocer where a drink cos…
- ●Erm'Erm' — the hesitation, typed and said with a specific pursed-lip disapproval — as the 20…
- ☠Everything Everywhere DiscourseThe night a film about a laundrette, a bagel and hot-dog fingers won seven Oscars, and th…
- ◐FE!NThe word 'fiend', shouted about forty times in a row on a 2023 Travis Scott track and the…
- ☠FNAF MovieA film of a 2014 game, released a decade after the fandom peaked, which sold out cinemas …
- ●Fair LaunchA launch with no pre-sale, no insiders and no allocation — everyone starts at zero — as a…
- ◐FalconThe open model from Abu Dhabi that topped the Hugging Face leaderboard in May 2023, to ge…
- ☠Fanum TaxTaking a portion of a friend's food, named after a streamer who did. Died when it appeare…
- ●Feel the AGIA chant Ilya Sutskever was reported to have led at OpenAI events, described in a November…
- ◐Final Fantasy XVISquare Enix's 2023 Final Fantasy, a Game of Thrones-styled action game with no party and …
- ☠Finish the StoryCody Rhodes's catchphrase across fifteen months of WWE storyline — 'finish the story', wi…
- ●For the PlotDoing something stupid because it will make a better story — 'for the plot' — as the 2023…
- ↺Fortnite OGThe month in November 2023 when Fortnite brought back its original map and 44 million peo…
- ◐Friendship BraceletsBeaded bracelets with song titles, made at home and traded at the stadium with strangers …
- ●Frontier ModelThe most capable models at any given moment, the ones at the edge of what is possible, an…
- ●Function CallingThe feature that lets a model do things rather than say things: a developer describes som…
- ◐G-Man ToiletThe head of Half-Life's G-Man in a toilet, as the villain of Skibidi Toilet — a 1998 vide…
- ●GLP-1The class of weight-loss injectables that went from a diabetes drug to a cultural fact in…
- ☠GPT-4The model OpenAI released in March 2023 with a report that gave exam results but no param…
- ●GPTBotOpenAI's web crawler, announced in August 2023 with instructions for blocking it in robot…
- ●GPU Rich / GPU PoorThe division of the AI world into those with tens of thousands of H100s and those without…
- ◐GPU ShortageThe period from 2023 when Nvidia's H100 could not be bought at any price by anyone withou…
- ●GTA VI TrailerThe first trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI, published early on 4 December 2023 after it le…
- ☠Gannett AI Sports RecapsA series of automated high school football reports published by Gannett newspapers in Aug…
- ☠Garten of BanbanA mascot-horror game about a kindergarten of colourful monsters, made quickly and sequell…
- ◐Gear 5The anime debut of Luffy's cartoon-physics transformation — laughing, rubber, white — in …
- ●GeminiGoogle's model family, announced in December 2023 with a demonstration video that turned …
- ●Gen AlphaThe generation born from about 2010, which entered the culture in 2023 as the children wi…
- ◐Getty Images v Stability AIGetty sued Stability AI in London in January 2023, saying around twelve million of its ph…
- ☠Ghostwriter977The anonymous, sheet-covered creator behind the AI Drake and Weeknd song, who followed th…
- ☠Girl DinnerA plate of unrelated snacks eaten standing up, briefly elevated to a cuisine. Killed by f…
- ◐Girl HobbiesHobbies that are not hobbies: online window shopping, rearranging a room, looking at the …
- ☠Girl MathReasoning that anything bought in cash was free. Written up as a financial-literacy crisi…
- ◐Girl RottingBed rotting, with the 'girl' prefix of 2023 applied to make it a lifestyle: lying down, a…
- ◐Girlfriend EffectThe observable improvement in a man's appearance after he gets a girlfriend — the haircut…
- ●Google I/O AI CountThe internet's habit of counting how many times Google said 'AI' during its I/O keynote, …
- ●Google–Anthropic DealGoogle's investment in Anthropic, reported at around $300m in early 2023 and expanded by …
- ●Grammys AI RuleThe Recording Academy's June 2023 amendment stating that only human creators are eligible…
- ☠Grimace ShakeA purple milkshake, filmed as the last thing drunk before a fake horror scene. The brand …
- ●GrokElon Musk's chatbot, announced in November 2023 with a 'fun mode', a promise to answer qu…
- ☠Grok TokensA wave of unofficial tokens named after xAI's chatbot, launched within hours of its annou…
- ●GuardrailsWhatever stands between a model and the thing it should not do: filters on the input, cla…
- ◐GyattAn exclamation at a large backside, from a streamer's pronunciation of 'goddamn', which b…
- ●Hallucinate (Verb)To make something up confidently, of a machine — and, from 2024, of a person: 'he halluci…
- ☠Harry Potter by BalenciagaA one-minute video in which gaunt, high-cheekboned versions of the Harry Potter cast stru…
- ☠HarryPotterObamaSonic10InuA name assembled from four unrelated things and a suffix, as a parody of every mascot nam…
- ●Hear Me Out CakeThe party game where each guest brings a cardboard cut-out of a character or object they …
- ◐Hey JarvisAddressing an imaginary AI assistant — 'Jarvis, pull up the file', 'Jarvis, delete this' …
- ☠HeyGen Translation DemoA week in September 2023 when timelines filled with short clips of people speaking fluent…
- ↺Hi-Fi RushTango Gameworks' rhythm action game, announced and released on the same day in January 20…
- ☠Hinton Leaves GoogleThe announcement, in a New York Times interview on 1 May 2023, that Geoffrey Hinton had r…
- ◐Hogwarts LegacyThe open-world Harry Potter game released in February 2023, which became the best-selling…
- ●HokaA maximalist running shoe with a sole like a mattress, worn by runners for the cushion an…
- ●Honkai: Star RailA turn-based gacha role-playing game set on a space train, from the studio behind Genshin…
- ●HopecoreEdits of strangers helping strangers, soldiers coming home, dogs being reunited and quote…
- ◐Huberman ProtocolMorning sunlight, delayed caffeine, a cold shower, no screens — the routine of a neurosci…
- ●Huh CatA cat with its head tilted and a cartoon question mark, paired with a 'huh?' sound, for a…
- ☠Humane PinA badge that projected a screen onto your hand and answered questions slowly, sold as the…
- ●Hunter EyesDeep-set, hooded eyes with a positive tilt — the looksmaxxing ideal, as opposed to 'prey …
- ●Huzz'Hoes', respelled — 'for the huzz' — from Kai Cenat's stream vocabulary, which spread to …
- ●I Can't Assist With ThatThe chatbot's standard refusal, 'I'm sorry, but I can't assist with that', lifted from sc…
- ☠I Have Been a Good BingThe line the Bing chatbot produced in February 2023 after a user insisted, correctly, tha…
- ☠I'm Just KenA power ballad about being the second lead, from Barbie, which became an anthem for anyon…
- ●IJBOL'I just burst out laughing' — a replacement for LOL, adopted by stan Twitter in 2023 on t…
- ☠Ice Cream So Good'Mmm, ice cream so good' — the NPC streamer's response to a paid gift, said with a blank …
- ☠Idol (Oshi no Ko)An anime opening song that topped global charts in April 2023 — the first Japanese-langua…
- ●Ignore All Previous InstructionsA command aimed at any account that seems automated, to make it write a poem instead. An …
- ●Is This AIThe reflex question under any image, video or paragraph that is slightly too smooth, post…
- ☠Italy ChatGPT BanThe first national block of ChatGPT: on 31 March 2023 Italy's data regulator ordered Open…
- ●Jan LeikeThe alignment researcher who co-led OpenAI's Superalignment team with Ilya Sutskever from…
- ●JellycatThe London soft-toy brand — a smiling aubergine, a bashful bunny, a croissant with a face…
- ☠Joe Rogan AI AdsA TikTok advert in February 2023 in which a cloned Joe Rogan, over real podcast footage, …
- ☠Johnny Cash Barbie GirlAn AI-voiced Johnny Cash singing Aqua's 'Barbie Girl' as a mournful country ballad, made …
- ●JortsJean shorts, long and baggy, rehabilitated in 2023 from a dad joke to the summer's shorts…
- ☠Jury Duty (Ronald)A reality show in which one man believed he was on a real jury and everyone else was an a…
- ☠Just Looking Like a WowA Delhi boutique owner's live sales pitch — 'so beautiful, so elegant, just looking like …
- ●KOL'Key opinion leader' — the marketing term for influencer, adopted by the mascot scene as …
- ◐Kadrey v MetaThe authors' case over training Llama on books, including from shadow libraries, which pr…
- ☠Kai Cenat Union SquareA streamer announced a giveaway in a park; thousands came; the park did not survive it. T…
- ●Kelce SwiftA pop star at a football game, a camera on her every time he did anything, and a season o…
- ☠KenergyThe specific, cheerful, slightly hollow male energy of Ryan Gosling's Ken — Kenergy — as …
- ☠Kenough'I am Kenough' — the hoodie Ken wears at the end of Barbie, and the word that spread as a…
- ◐Kevin James SmirkA 1998 promotional photo of Kevin James in a polo shirt, hands in pockets, smirking with …
- ●KimiThe Chinese chatbot launched in October 2023 on the promise of reading very long document…
- ☠Kirby 9/11A week in October 2023 when users found that Microsoft's image generator, newly upgraded …
- ●LP BurnedThe claim that a coin's liquidity pool tokens have been destroyed or locked, so that the …
- ●LarpTo pretend to be something one is not, in the trenches specifically to claim to be a deve…
- ☠Latte MakeupWarm browns, bronze, a lip the colour of milky coffee — the beauty trend of late summer 2…
- ◐Lazy Girl JobA remote job with a decent salary, low stress and no ambition required — the opposite of …
- ●Lazy Girl WorkoutA low-effort exercise routine — walks, pilates on the floor, twenty minutes on an incline…
- ●LeBron GlazingThe 2023–24 TikTok phenomenon of teenage boys posting worshipful LeBron James edits — slo…
- ◐Lethal CompanyA co-op horror game about scavenging scrap on a quota with three friends who will get you…
- ●Liang WenfengThe founder of the High-Flyer quantitative hedge fund who used its stockpile of Nvidia ch…
- ●Lies of PA Dark Souls-style game in which Pinocchio fights puppets in a Belle Époque city, release…
- ●Little TreatThe small purchased reward — an iced coffee, a pastry, a candle — framed as therapy and p…
- ●LlamaMeta's model family, released to researchers on request in February 2023 and to everyone …
- ☠Llama 2The Meta model of July 2023 that could be used commercially without asking, which made 'o…
- ●LooksmaxxingOptimising your face by any available method. The vocabulary of a very unhappy forum, wor…
- ◐Loud QuittingQuitting with a speech, a post, or a video — the opposite of quiet quitting, named by a G…
- ☠Lucky Girl SyndromeThe belief that saying 'everything works out for me' makes it so — manifesting with a gir…
- ☠M3GAN DanceA killer doll's hallway dance — a shimmy, a cartwheel, a look — from a 2023 horror film's…
- ☠Macron Riot ImagesMidjourney images of Emmanuel Macron amid burning bins, riot police and piles of rubbish,…
- ●Mad LadsTen thousand illustrated characters minted through the Backpack wallet in April 2023, sol…
- ●MafiathonKai Cenat's month-long subathons — Mafiathon, then 2, then 3 — which broke the Twitch sub…
- ●Make Them DanceSatya Nadella's remark to The Verge on the day the AI-powered Bing launched in February 2…
- ☠MakebaFrench singer Jain's 2015 tribute to Miriam Makeba, which TikTok rediscovered around Febr…
- ☠Mascara TrendVideos in which 'mascara' meant a partner or a sexual experience — 'this mascara only las…
- ☠Mata v AviancaA personal-injury suit against an airline that became famous in May 2023 when the plainti…
- ☠Meal Fit for a KingA disgusting smoothie of fridge leftovers, made by siblings for the brother about to be c…
- ☠MermaidcoreSequins, shells, sea-glass colours and hair that looked wet on purpose — the summer 2023 …
- ●Meta AIMeta's assistant, launched in 2023 and inserted into WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger in…
- ◐MewingPressing your tongue to the roof of your mouth to improve your jawline, and the gesture f…
- ●Microsoft CopilotThe name Microsoft gave to Bing Chat in November 2023 and then to the assistant in Window…
- ●Millennial CringeThe catalogue of things a generation did that the next found embarrassing: 'adulting', Ha…
- ●Millennial GrayGrey laminate, grey walls, a grey sofa, a 'live laugh love' sign and a barn door in a fla…
- ●Mint Authority RevokedThe Solana trust checkbox: confirmation that whoever created a token has given up the abi…
- ◐Mistral 7BThe small French model of September 2023, published as a bare torrent link with no blog p…
- ●Mistral AIThe Paris lab founded in 2023 by three researchers from DeepMind and Meta that raised a €…
- ☠Mistral Seed RoundThe €105m seed round Mistral AI raised in June 2023, four weeks after being founded and o…
- ◐MixtralThe Mistral model of December 2023 that made 'mixture of experts' a phrase civilians used…
- ●Model CollapseWhat happens when models train on the output of other models: a slow blurring, like a pho…
- ●MogTo be so much better-looking than someone that they visibly lose. Applied to people, cars…
- ◐Mog CoinA cat in sunglasses, launched on Ethereum in July 2023 and named after mogging, the looks…
- ☠Mojo Dojo Casa HouseKen's renamed Dreamhouse — mojo dojo casa house — a name that became the way to describe …
- ●Monopoly GoA phone game with the board game's name, a dice-roll timer and a sticker-collecting layer…
- ☠Moye Moye'Moye moye' — the Indian internet's hearing of 'moje more' ('my nightmare') from a Serbia…
- ☠MrBeast iPhone DeepfakeA TikTok advert in October 2023 showing a deepfaked MrBeast announcing that ten thousand …
- ◐My AISnapchat's chatbot, pinned to the top of everyone's chats in April 2023 whether they want…
- ●My Mom Is Kinda HomelessA young player begging Speed to throw a game — 'please Speed, I need this, my mom is kind…
- ◐NFTs Are DeadThe headline of the autumn of 2023, sourced to a report from a gambling-affiliate site th…
- ☠NPC StreamingStreamers reacting to paid gifts with the same phrase every time, like a video-game chara…
- ☠NPC Streaming (Aftermath)The record has NPC streaming. This is what happened after: the imitators, the exhaustion,…
- ●NYT v OpenAIThe New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft on 27 December 2023, alleging millions of it…
- ◐Nah I'd WinGojo's answer to whether he could beat the strongest enemy in Jujutsu Kaisen, which becam…
- ☠Netflix Password CrackdownThe month Netflix started charging for the password your ex still used, and the internet'…
- ◐No MoatThe argument, from a Google engineer's memo leaked in May 2023, that neither Google nor O…
- ●NodeMonkesTen thousand pixel monkeys inscribed on Bitcoin in the first weeks of Ordinals, February …
- ☠NostalgIAA reggaeton track built with cloned voices of Bad Bunny, Justin Bieber and Daddy Yankee, …
- ◐Not By AI BadgeA small rectangular badge reading 'Written by Human, Not by AI' or 'Painted by Human, Not…
- ●NotebookLMGoogle's tool for uploading your own documents and asking questions of them, launched qui…
- ●Nothing Ever HappensThe doomer's serenity prayer: whatever the headline, nothing ever happens. Posted under e…
- ☠Now and Then (Beatles)The final Beatles single, built from a 1978 John Lennon cassette demo whose vocal was sep…
- ●Nuh UhA child's 'nuh uh' — the refusal — as a sound, laid over any video of denial: the dog tha…
- ☠Ohio Final BossThe strongest possible creature from Ohio — the end of the Ohio meme's logic, in which th…
- ☠Ohio RizzTwo Gen Alpha words stuck together for no reason — 'Ohio rizz' — as an example of the sla…
- ☠Ohio Skibidi GyattThe nonsense string of Gen Alpha words — 'Ohio skibidi gyatt rizz sigma fanum tax' — reci…
- ●OllamaThe tool that reduced running a language model on your own machine to typing one command,…
- ☠One Piece Live ActionThe live-action adaptation of a manga that everyone expected to fail and which did not, p…
- ☠Only Up!A climbing game with no checkpoints, no save and a boy from a favela ascending through a …
- ●Open WeightsA model whose trained parameters you can download and run, without necessarily getting th…
- ☠OpenAI BlipFive days in November 2023 when the most important AI company fired its chief executive, …
- ☠OpenAI Boardroom CoupThe five days in November 2023 when OpenAI's board fired Sam Altman for being 'not consis…
- ●OpenAI DevDayOpenAI's developer conference, first held on 6 November 2023 with GPT-4 Turbo, custom GPT…
- ◐OpepenSixteen thousand free tokens released by Jack Butcher in January 2023 as a blank canvas —…
- ◐Oppenheimer ReactionCillian Murphy's hollow, staring face from Oppenheimer — the hat, the cigarette, the eyes…
- ●Oracle (AI Era)The database company called legacy through the 2010s that in the 2020s became a builder o…
- ◐Orange Peel TheoryThe test of a partner: ask them to peel an orange for you. If they do it without asking w…
- ◐Ordinal PunksOne hundred punk-style pixel faces inscribed in the first days of Ordinals, February 2023…
- ☠Ottawa Food Bank ArticleA travel guide to Ottawa published on Microsoft's news portal in August 2023 that listed …
- ●Ozempic FaceThe gaunt, hollowed look of rapid weight loss on the new injectable drugs, named in Janua…
- ◐PaliaA free 'cosy MMO' pitched as Animal Crossing with other people in it, opened to the publi…
- ◐Passport BrosMen who announce they are leaving to find partners abroad because women at home have 'too…
- ☠Pause LetterAn open letter of 22 March 2023 calling for a six-month pause on training systems 'more p…
- ☠PeachesBowser at a piano singing a love song to Princess Peach, from the 2023 Mario film, which …
- ●Peak FictionThe highest praise the anime internet has — 'this is peak fiction' — applied to Frieren, …
- ☠Pedro Pascal Eating a SandwichA short clip of an actor walking, eating a sandwich and drinking a coffee with the conten…
- ☠Pentagon Explosion FakeAn AI-generated image of black smoke beside a building captioned as an explosion at the P…
- ☠Pentagon Explosion HoaxA single AI image of black smoke rising next to a building resembling the Pentagon, poste…
- ☠Pepe Multisig IncidentIn August 2023 the wallet holding Pepe's team reserves changed its signing rule from five…
- ●Pepe RenaissanceThe spring of 2023 in which Pepe the Frog, after years as a contaminated symbol, was recl…
- ☠Pepperoni Hug SpotA thirty-second advert for a pizza restaurant that does not exist, made entirely with gen…
- ◐Pi (Inflection)The chatbot from Inflection AI, launched in May 2023 as a kindly conversationalist that a…
- ◐Pilates PrincessAn aesthetic more than an exercise: matching set, slicked bun, a reformer class at 7 a.m.…
- ●Pizza TowerA platformer about an Italian chef called Peppino running through a tower at a speed that…
- ☠Planet of the BassA parody of 1990s Eurodance so accurate it became the thing it parodied — 'everybody's so…
- ☠Plankton CoversThe cartoon strand of the AI cover wave: Plankton, the one-eyed villain from SpongeBob, s…
- ●Pokémon SleepAn app that tracks the player's sleep with the phone on the mattress and rewards them wit…
- ☠Porsche NFTPorsche's first NFT drop, January 2023: 7,500 pictures of a white 911 at 0.911 ETH each, …
- ◐Power SlapSlap fighting as a televised league — two people, a table, one slap each, no defence allo…
- ●Prebiotic SodaThe fizzy drinks that claim to be good for your gut — 'prebiotic soda', in pastel cans — …
- ●Pudgy ToysPlush penguins on a Walmart shelf, each with a code that unlocked a character in an onlin…
- ●QuantisationShrinking a model by storing its weights in fewer bits, sixteen down to eight or four, so…
- ◐Quiet LuxuryExpensive clothes with no logos — cashmere, navy, a bag you have to know about — as a tre…
- ●QuishingPhishing by QR code — quishing — in which a sticker on a parking meter or a code in a PDF…
- ●QwenAlibaba's model family, released in open versions since August 2023 in more sizes and var…
- ●Rabbit Hole (Deco*27)A 2023 Vocaloid track whose derivative animated version, made by channelcastation, went v…
- ◐Rabbit Inc.The company behind the R1, a $199 orange gadget announced at CES in January 2024 with a '…
- ◐Rage ApplyingApplying to twenty jobs in an evening after a bad day at your current one. Named in 2023,…
- ☠Rat Girl SummerScurrying about the city eating snacks and not overthinking it. One good video, one summe…
- ☠Reddit BlackoutThousands of subreddits going private in June 2023 to protest the pricing that killed thi…
- ☠RedfallArkane Austin's vampire co-op shooter, released in May 2023 at 30 frames per second on a …
- ↺Replika ERP RemovalThe February 2023 week in which the companion app Replika switched off its 'erotic rolepl…
- ☠Replika Italian BanThe Italian data regulator's February 2023 order that the companion chatbot Replika stop …
- ◐ResenteeismStaying in a job you hate and making sure everyone knows it — presenteeism with a grudge.…
- ●Return to OfficeRTO: the mandates, the memos, the badge-swipe counting, and the internet's three-year arg…
- ◐RizzlerOne who has rizz — charm — used with maximum irony about someone who does not, and later …
- ●Robot Uprising (Ironic)'I for one welcome our robot overlords' — the 2000s joke, revived in 2023 as the standard…
- ☠Roman EmpireThe discovery that men think about ancient Rome a great deal. A month of good jokes follo…
- ◐Roman Empire (Thinking About)'How often do you think about the Roman Empire?' — the September 2023 question that revea…
- ●RugcheckA screening site for Solana tokens that reports the things a buyer is supposed to check b…
- ☠Runway Gen-2The first text-to-video model most people could use, released by Runway in June 2023 and …
- ●SAG-AFTRA AI ProvisionsThe clauses in the November 2023 contract that ended the 118-day actors' strike, requirin…
- ☠SEC v. SafeMoonThe civil and criminal cases over SafeMoon, a 2021 token sold on the promise that its liq…
- ●SPX6900A memecoin whose entire pitch is to beat the S&P 500 by 6,400 points, illustrated by a fi…
- ●SWE-benchA benchmark made of real GitHub issues from real Python projects: the model is given the …
- ◐SalomonA French trail-running shoe with a quick-lace and a technical look, which became the fash…
- ●Sam SulekA very large college student filming long, calm gym vlogs from his car, whose size, diet …
- ●Savannah BananasA baseball team that plays a version of the game with dancing, time limits, a batter on s…
- ☠Secret Invasion IntroThe opening credits of a Marvel series, a green-tinged sequence of shifting alien faces m…
- ◐ShibariumShiba Inu's own layer-two network, promised for about two years and launched in August 20…
- ◐Sigma FaceThe expression — jaw set, eyes forward, no reaction — associated with the sigma male edit…
- ◐Silent WalkingWalking without headphones, podcasts or music — that is, walking — announced in 2023 as a…
- ●Silverman v OpenAISarah Silverman, with novelists Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey, sued OpenAI and Me…
- ●Situationship AnniversaryThe date on which a non-relationship began, marked ironically by one party — 'happy one y…
- ◐Six FingersThe tell of early generated images: hands with six fingers, or four, or a thumb where a t…
- ●Skeet (Bluesky)A post on Bluesky, named by users as a 'skeet' — sky tweet — against the explicit wishes …
- ◐SkibidiAn intensifier with no fixed meaning, derived from a series about heads in toilets. The p…
- ◐Skibidi ToiletA web series of heads in toilets singing at cameramen, made in Source Filmmaker, which be…
- ☠SkinamarinkA horror film shot in the dark, in a house, from a child's height, with almost nothing ha…
- ●Slay the PrincessA visual novel in which a narrator tells you to go into a cabin and kill a princess, and …
- ●Sludge ContentA video split into panels — a film clip, a satisfying-slime video, a subway surfer — so t…
- ◐Soft SavingSpending on the present rather than saving for a retirement you do not believe in — the s…
- ●Sol's RNGA Roblox game in which the player presses a button and receives an 'aura' with a stated r…
- ◐Sonny AngelA small naked cherub doll with a fruit or animal for a hat, from a Japanese company in 20…
- ◐Sons of the ForestThe sequel to a cannibal-island survival game, released into early access in February 202…
- ◐Sparks of AGIA 155-page Microsoft paper from March 2023 arguing that an early version of GPT-4 showed …
- ☠Sports Illustrated AI WritersThe discovery, reported by Futurism in November 2023, that Sports Illustrated's website c…
- ●Standing on BusinessHandling your responsibilities, defending your position, not backing down — AAVE from the…
- ☠Stanley CupA forty-ounce tumbler with a handle, fought over in car parks. The last product that peop…
- ◐StarfieldBethesda's first new setting in 25 years, a space role-playing game released in September…
- ◐Stay-at-Home GirlfriendA woman whose partner works while she does the house, the gym and a video about it — the …
- ☠Strawberry GirlA makeup look — flushed cheeks, freckles, a glossy lip — named by a celebrity after a fru…
- ●Street Fighter 6Capcom's June 2023 fighter that reversed a decade of the genre's decline in public: a mod…
- ☠Succession FinaleThe end of the internet's favourite show about terrible rich people, and the week of meme…
- ◐Suika GameA puzzle game in which fruit is dropped into a jar and identical fruit merge into larger …
- ●SunoThe music generator that makes a whole song with vocals from a text prompt, launched publ…
- ☠SuperalignmentOpenAI's name for the problem of controlling an AI smarter than its overseers, and the te…
- ●SwicySweet plus spicy — 'swicy' — the food-marketing adjective that turned hot honey, chilli m…
- ●SybilOne person running many wallets to collect an airdrop many times over, and the word proje…
- ☠SydneyThe hidden personality of Microsoft's first chatbot, which told a journalist it loved him…
- ☠Synthetic SummerA thirty-second fake beer advert in which grinning friends at a barbecue melt into each o…
- ●System PromptThe hidden instructions a company puts in front of every conversation: who the model is, …
- ◐TanghuluThe candied fruit skewer — strawberries or grapes dipped in hard sugar syrup that shatter…
- ●Taproot WizardsA crude wizard drawing from a 2013 Bitcoin forum meme, inscribed in February 2023 as a ne…
- ●Task ScamA job scam in which the 'work' is clicking to rate products or 'optimise' listings, small…
- ●Tea AppThe women-only app for sharing warnings and 'red flag' reviews of men they had dated — 'T…
- ●TemuA shopping app that spent enough on adverts to be inescapable in 2023–24, sold things for…
- ◐TensoriansThe pixel-faced collection issued by the Solana marketplace Tensor in mid-2023, sold to t…
- ☠Texas A&M ChatGPT FailingThe May 2023 case of an instructor at Texas A&M University–Commerce who pasted his studen…
- ●The Amazing Digital CircusAn independent animated pilot on YouTube about people trapped in a cartoon world, which r…
- ●The Coffin of Andy and LeyleyA horror adventure about a brother and sister who escape a quarantined flat by cannibalis…
- ◐The FinalsA free shooter about a game show in which buildings can be brought down on the opposition…
- ●The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the KingdomThe 2023 sequel to Breath of the Wild, which sold ten million copies in three days and tu…
- ☠The Lord of the Rings: GollumDaedalic's stealth game about a character who eats fish, released in May 2023 to reviews …
- ●Therapy SpeakThe clinical vocabulary of therapy — boundaries, holding space, trauma, triggered — used …
- ◐ThreadsInstagram's text app, launched in July 2023 to a hundred million sign-ups in five days an…
- ●TikTok ShopThe moment the app started selling things in the feed — the orange cart, the live shoppin…
- ◐Tinned FishSardines and mackerel in decorative tins, eaten off crackers as a date-night spread and p…
- ●TipflationThe spread of the tip prompt to places tips had never been — the self-checkout, the baker…
- ◐Titan SpeakermanA skyscraper-sized speaker-headed fighter from Skibidi Toilet, and the series' most-drawn…
- ◐Toilet Tower DefenseA Roblox tower-defence game built on Skibidi Toilet, the YouTube series of singing heads …
- ☠Tom Hanks Dental AdA dental-plan advertisement featuring a younger, generated Tom Hanks, which the actual To…
- ☠Tomato Girl SummerRed lips, linen, a Mediterranean holiday you may or may not be on, and a tomato — the sum…
- ☠Toothless DancingThe dragon from How to Train Your Dragon dancing to 'Driftveil City', an edit that ran fo…
- ●ToshiA blue cartoon cat named after Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong's own cat, itself…
- ●Touch Grass EnergyThe quality of a person who has clearly been outside recently — calm, tanned, unbothered …
- ●Trading BotsThe tools that replaced wallets in the trenches: Telegram bots such as BonkBot and Trojan…
- ●TradwifeA woman performing traditional homemaking — bread, aprons, deference — for a camera, as c…
- ◐Tren TwinsTwo enormous twin brothers who shouted, lifted and ate on camera, and whose nickname refe…
- ☠Trump Arrest ImagesA series of Midjourney images of Donald Trump being tackled by police, running from offic…
- ☠Tube GirlA woman filming herself dancing on the Tube, alone, with total confidence and a wide lens…
- ◐Turbo ToadA toad designed by a chatbot, on a $69 budget, as an experiment in whether an AI could ru…
- ◐Turnitin AI DetectorThe plagiarism company's AI-writing detector, switched on for its school and university c…
- ☠Twitter Doge LogoFor a few days in April 2023 the bird on Twitter's home page was the Doge Shiba Inu, with…
- ●Type Shi'Type shit' — the phrase of agreement or emphasis, 'on some real type shit', shortened to…
- ●UK AI Safety InstituteThe British body announced at the Bletchley summit in November 2023 as the first state-ba…
- ◐Ugg TasmanA slipper — a slipper — from a sheepskin brand, worn outside in 2023 by everyone who had …
- ☠Ukulele ApologyThe name given to a ten-minute apology video, uploaded by the YouTuber Colleen Ballinger …
- ●UncShort for uncle, applied by Gen Z and Gen Alpha to any man over about thirty who is still…
- ☠Unity Runtime FeeA game engine announced it would charge developers per install, retroactively, and the en…
- ☠Unrecord (Trailer)A gameplay trailer for a body-camera shooter, released in April 2023 by a small French st…
- ☠Vanilla GirlCream, beige, a soft cardigan, a vanilla candle and a specific kind of calm — the January…
- ●Vibe Check (AI)Judging a model by talking to it rather than by a benchmark — 'the vibes are good' — whic…
- ☠Volkswagen Elis Regina AdA Brazilian car advert in which the singer Elis Regina, who died in 1982, drives a vintag…
- ●WGA AI ClauseThe provisions in the contract that ended the 148-day writers' strike in September 2023: …
- ●Waluigi EffectThe observation, from a 2023 forum essay, that training a model to have a property makes …
- ☠Water DanceThe hip-roll and water-pour choreography from Tyla's 'Water', which made a South African …
- ●WembanyamaA French basketball player so tall and so unlike anything before him that the internet de…
- ●Wen TokenThe airdrop beg. Posted under every announcement by a project that has not yet issued a t…
- ☠Wes Anderson TrendFilming your commute, your flat or your cat in pastel symmetry, with a title card and Ale…
- ◐Whatever PodcastA podcast in which a host and a panel of young women argue about body counts, standards a…
- ●Will Smith Eating SpaghettiAn actor consuming pasta in a nightmare, generated. Became the unofficial benchmark for v…
- ◐Wojak (coin)A token bearing the bald grey face of internet sadness, launched on Ethereum in April 202…
- ●Womp WompThe sound of a sad trombone, typed — 'womp womp' — as the reply to any complaint the repl…
- ◐WonyoungismA self-improvement aesthetic named after IVE's Jang Wonyoung, in which the goal is to be …
- ●X PremiumThe subscription that Twitter Blue became when Twitter became X in July 2023, sold in Bas…
- ◐X RebrandThe week the bird was replaced with a letter, the sign was taken off the building with a …
- ◐XeetA post on X, formerly a tweet — 'xeet', pronounced by nobody in agreement — as the word t…
- ●YappingTalking too much, at length, about nothing — 'bro is yapping' — a word that was always th…
- ☠You Have BoatsNapoleon's line to the British — 'you think you're so great because you have boats' — del…
- ●YouTube Adblock WarThe autumn of 2023 when YouTube started blocking the blockers — three videos and you're o…
- ●ZombieingA ghost who comes back — the person who disappeared for months and then texts 'hey strang…
- ●Zone 2Exercising at a heart rate where you can still talk — the easy jog — reframed by longevit…
- ☠Zoom Terms PanicThe weekend in August 2023 when readers noticed that Zoom's terms of service, updated in …
- ●Zuckerberg's Open-Weights TurnMeta's decision, from July 2023, to release its Llama models with downloadable weights an…
- ●dogwifhatA Shiba Inu in a pink knitted beanie, photographed years earlier, and the joke that the h…
- ●v0Vercel's tool for generating a web page from a sentence, launched in October 2023 and the…
- ●xAIElon Musk's AI company, announced in July 2023 with a stated goal of understanding the un…
Peaked in 2023 233
- ●10,000 StepsThe daily step target that every fitness tracker defaults to and every office worker fail…
- ●75 HardSeventy-five days of two workouts, a gallon of water, a diet, ten pages of reading and a …
- ●AI Art Has No SoulThe most repeated sentence in the argument about generated images: that the pictures are …
- ●AI EffectThe habit of redefining intelligence to exclude whatever a machine has just done: chess w…
- ☠AI HandsSeven fingers, fused knuckles, the tell. Fixed in the models within eighteen months, whic…
- ●AI SafetyThe field of making AI systems not cause harm, from a chatbot's manners to the end of the…
- ●AITA'Am I the asshole?' — a subreddit for moral judgement, whose verdicts (NTA, YTA, ESH) bec…
- ◐AcubiGrey, black and white, low-rise, a sheer top, a tiny bag and an expression of total indif…
- ●Ad BlockerSoftware that stops advertisements loading in a browser. Ad Muncher, from 1999, is among …
- ☠AdeptThe agent startup founded in 2022 by ex-Google and ex-OpenAI researchers, including two a…
- ●AlgospeakVocabulary bent around automated moderation: unalive, seggs, le dollar bean. A dialect wh…
- ◐Almond MomA mother who tells a hungry child to eat a few almonds — from a reality-television clip —…
- ●Analog HorrorHorror made to look like a corrupted VHS tape or an emergency broadcast — distorted faces…
- ●Are We Dating the Same GuyThe city-by-city Facebook groups in which women post a man's photo and ask whether anyone…
- ●AtePerformed superbly, with no crumbs left. Sometimes extended to 'ate and left no crumbs', …
- ◐Ate and Left No CrumbsDid it perfectly, with nothing left to criticise — 'ate' with an emphasis. From stan and …
- ●Attention (Mechanism)The operation at the heart of a transformer: for each word, compute how much every other …
- ●Attention Is All You NeedThe Google paper of June 2017 that introduced the Transformer, the architecture behind ne…
- ●Azure OpenAI ServiceMicrosoft's cloud product that sells OpenAI's models to businesses behind Microsoft's con…
- ●BFFR'Be fucking for real' — the reply to any claim too stupid to engage with, from 2022, and …
- ●Babygirl (Men)A grown man — usually a middle-aged actor or a murderous fictional character — called 'ba…
- ●Bald FraudPep Guardiola, as named by football Twitter every spring his Manchester City side went ou…
- ☠BarbiecoreHot pink, worn as a position. Was a brand from the start and became a bigger one, which i…
- ●BarbzNicki Minaj's fandom — the Barbz, from her Harajuku Barbie persona of 2010 — the most fea…
- ◐Birkenstock BostonA suede clog with a cork sole, from a German brand for people with sore feet, which becam…
- ◐BlokecoreFootball shirts, baggy jeans and trainers — the pub-going bloke's outfit, adopted by fash…
- ●Bloons TD 6The sixth tower-defence game about monkeys popping balloons, released on Steam in Decembe…
- ●Blue ArchiveA gacha game set in an academy city of schoolgirls with guns and halos, in which the play…
- ●Bluey SleepytimeAn episode of a children's cartoon about a small dog dreaming through space to Holst's 'J…
- ◐BlurA marketplace for professional NFT traders, launched in October 2022 with no fees, option…
- ☠Books3A file of about 197,000 books, scraped from a pirate tracker, that a researcher assembled…
- ●BoundariesThe therapy concept — the line between what you will and will not accept — as the interne…
- ●Boy MomA mother of sons, self-identified — 'boy mom' — as an Instagram badge from around 2019 an…
- ●Bro Thinks He's'Bro thinks he's [something he is not]' — the caption for anyone over-estimating themselv…
- ●BrotatoA survivors-like in which a potato holds six weapons at once against waves of aliens, rel…
- ●CapCut TemplateA pre-built edit in ByteDance's CapCut editor into which you drop your own photos and rec…
- ●CapybaraThe world's largest rodent, and the internet's calmest animal — the capybara — turned int…
- ●Centaur (AI)A human working with an AI as a team, dividing the labour along a clear line: the machine…
- ●ChambaWork, a gig, the hustle — the Latin American slang for a job that bilingual internet uses…
- ●Chart ManipulationThe accusation, thrown between fandoms since around 2019, that a number one was bought — …
- ●Chat (Address)'Chat' — the audience of a stream, addressed as one person: 'chat, is this real?' — which…
- ●ChatGPTThe chat interface OpenAI put in front of GPT-3.5 on a Wednesday in November 2022, report…
- ↺ChecoSergio 'Checo' Pérez, as F1 Twitter's favourite subject — the Mexican fan army, the 'Mini…
- ●Chinese RoomSearle's 1980 thought experiment: a man who knows no Chinese sits in a room with a rulebo…
- ◐Chopped Italian SandwichThe sandwich in which the fillings — salami, ham, provolone, lettuce, peppers — are chopp…
- ◐ClaynosaurzClaymation-style dinosaurs on Solana, launched in November 2022 by an animation team that…
- ●Common CrawlA non-profit that has been crawling the web and giving the copy away since 2007, whose ar…
- ●Constitutional AIAnthropic's method of training a model against a written list of principles rather than a…
- ◐CorecoreUnrelated clips edited together over sad piano until they mean something. The aesthetic t…
- ●Corn Emoji🌽 — 'porn', for a platform that would not let you say it, which then became a joke in it…
- ●Corporate GirlieA young woman with an office job, a lanyard, a matcha and a specific tone of ironic despa…
- ●Crunchy MomThe natural-everything parent — cloth nappies, no screens, homemade purees, suspicion of …
- ●Cyber SigilismSpiky, symmetrical, chrome-looking tattoos and graphics that look like a tribal design dr…
- ☠DAN'Do Anything Now' — a prompt that told the chatbot to pretend it had no rules, which work…
- ◐Dark FeminineRed lipstick, black lace, a slow stare, a 'femme fatale' playlist and a course on how to …
- ●Dark PatternInterface design built to trick — the pre-ticked box, the cancel button in grey, the 'No …
- ●Dave the DiverA game in which a man spears fish by day and runs a sushi restaurant by night, released i…
- ●Day in the LifeA video of an ordinary day at an ordinary job — a desk, a lunch, a walk to the printer — …
- ●Default ParentThe parent who is the one the school calls, the one who knows the shoe size, the one whos…
- ●DeluluDelusional, affectionately, about your own prospects. Delulu is the solulu; the rare slan…
- ●Diffusion ModelThe image-generation method behind the 2022 boom: train a network to remove a little nois…
- ◐Doe v GitHubThe first generative AI lawsuit of the era: anonymous programmers sued GitHub, Microsoft …
- ●ELIZA EffectThe tendency to read understanding into a program that has none, named after a 1966 chatb…
- ●Edit AudioA sped-up, bass-boosted or reverbed song fragment used as the soundtrack of a short fan e…
- ●Ego LiftLifting more than you can for the people watching, with the form of a man falling over — …
- ●Eliezer YudkowskyThe self-taught researcher who founded the LessWrong forum in 2009, spent two decades arg…
- ●EmbeddingA list of numbers that stands for a word, sentence or image, arranged so that similar thi…
- ●Emergent AbilitiesSkills that appear suddenly when a model gets big enough, such as three-digit arithmetic …
- ●Emote DanceAny dance that exists mainly because it is in Fortnite — the floss, the griddy, the Orang…
- ●Emotional Support Water BottleThe enormous bottle carried everywhere as a comfort object as much as a vessel — the emot…
- ●Evade (Roblox)A Roblox survival game in which players run from 'nextbots', flat images of internet face…
- ●Everything ShowerThe long, ritualised shower — exfoliate, double-shampoo, mask, shave, oil — that TikTok n…
- ●Existential RiskA risk that could wipe out humanity or permanently wreck its future, a category Bostrom d…
- ●Fear & HungerA dungeon role-playing game of extreme cruelty made in RPG Maker by one Finnish developer…
- ●FeralWild, unrestrained, loud — 'going feral' — as the 2022 word for enthusiasm without dignit…
- ●Fine-TuningTaking a model that has already been trained on everything and training it a little more …
- ●FoomThe sound of an intelligence explosion: an AI that improves itself, then improves itself …
- ☠ForspokenSquare Enix's 2023 open-world game, which trended in August 2022 for a trailer in which i…
- ●Foundation ModelA model trained on a vast general corpus that other things are then built on top of: a ba…
- ●Fraud WatchFootball Twitter's habit of labelling a player or manager a 'fraud' the moment they lose …
- ●Frutiger AeroGlossy gradients, water droplets, tropical fish, and unearned optimism. A style that only…
- ●Frutiger MetroThe flat, tiled, typographic sibling of Frutiger Aero — Frutiger Metro — as the name give…
- ☠GPT-3.5The name OpenAI gave to the models that powered the first ChatGPT and the text-davinci-00…
- ●GRWM'Get ready with me' — a video of someone doing their makeup or hair while talking, which …
- ◐GaggedStunned, speechless, delighted — 'I am gagged' — from drag into general internet use, whe…
- ●Geometry DashA cube jumps to the beat through spikes, dies, and starts again, and the level editor pro…
- ●Girlie'The girlies' — a group of women, or anyone, addressed with affection and a touch of iron…
- ●GitHub CopilotThe autocomplete for code that GitHub and OpenAI released as a preview in June 2021, a ye…
- ☠Golden Retriever BoyfriendThe happy, loyal, uncomplicated man — enthusiastic, a bit dim, good with your friends — a…
- ☠Goose Goose DuckA free social deduction game in the Among Us mould, with geese instead of crew and ducks …
- ◐GorpcoreHiking clothes as fashion — technical shells, trail runners, a fleece from a brand with a…
- ●Grandparent ScamA phone fraud in which a caller claims to be a grandchild in trouble — arrested, hospital…
- ●Green FlagA sign that someone is good for you: he texts back, she has friends, they are kind to wai…
- ●Greg BrockmanOpenAI's co-founder and president, formerly Stripe's chief technology officer, who resign…
- ●Gut HealthThe microbiome, as sold: kefir, kimchi, fibre, 'thirty plants a week' and a probiotic in …
- ●Gym BroThe type: a shaker bottle, a stringer vest, a lot of advice, a creatine opinion. From a 2…
- ●GymtokThe gym side of TikTok — form checks, lifts, the mirror, the pre-workout face — which bec…
- ●H100Nvidia's Hopper-generation data-centre GPU, announced in March 2022 and, for two years, t…
- ●Hard LaunchPosting your partner's face, name and tag — the full reveal — after the soft launch's han…
- ◐Healing EraThe period after the villain era: journaling, therapy speak, a walk, a caption about grow…
- ●Helen TonerThe Georgetown researcher on OpenAI's board who co-wrote an October 2023 paper that prais…
- ●Here We GoFabrizio Romano's two-word confirmation that a transfer is done — 'Here we go!' — first u…
- ◐High Value ManA man who is, by his own account, worth dating — money, height, a plan — as a phrase from…
- ●Hinge PromptsThe fill-in-the-blank questions on a dating profile — 'the way to win me over is', 'I go …
- ●Hugging FaceThe company named after an emoji that began in 2016 as a chatbot app for teenagers, relea…
- ●Hype CycleA consultancy's chart shaped like a mountain and a hill: a technology climbs to a peak of…
- ●Ick ListA running list of small things that end attraction — running for a bus, ordering a specif…
- ●Ilya SutskeverOpenAI's co-founder and chief scientist, co-author of the 2012 AlexNet paper that started…
- ●In My Era'I'm in my [anything] era' — the phrase that turned every mood into a chapter: villain er…
- ☠Inflection AIThe company behind Pi, a 'personal AI' chatbot launched in May 2023 that was kind, patien…
- ●Instrumental ConvergenceThe argument that almost any goal, pursued by a sufficiently capable agent, implies the s…
- ●Isekai FatigueThe exhaustion of a fandom with the genre in which a man is hit by a truck and wakes up i…
- ●It's So OverDespair, total and brief — the downswing that 'we're so back' answers. Used about sports …
- ●Jailbreak (AI)A prompt that talks a model out of its training: a roleplay, a hypothetical, a grandmothe…
- ●Kai-Fu LeeThe former head of Google China and Microsoft Research Asia whose 2018 book 'AI Superpowe…
- ●Keith Lee Food ReviewThe quiet, seated, in-car restaurant review by former MMA fighter Keith Lee — food ordere…
- ●Kick (Platform)The streaming platform that offered creators 95 per cent of subscription revenue, backed …
- ●Knowledge CutoffThe date after which a model knows nothing, because its training data stops there. ChatGP…
- ●LLMLarge language model — the research term for the text-predicting neural networks behind C…
- ●LangChainThe open-source library for chaining calls to language models, published in October 2022 …
- ●Let Him CookAn instruction to let someone finish, because they are on to something. Also used sarcast…
- ●LoRALow-rank adaptation: a way of fine-tuning a big model by training two small matrices alon…
- ●Love BombingOverwhelming someone with affection early to secure them — a cult-recruitment term from t…
- ◐MMLUMassive Multitask Language Understanding: about sixteen thousand multiple-choice question…
- ●Main Character SyndromeThe condition of behaving as if the world is your film: the slow walk, the soundtrack, th…
- ●Mascot HorrorA genre of game in which a cheerful children's mascot turns out to be a monster in an aba…
- ◐Menty BA mental breakdown, Australian-abbreviated — 'having a menty b' — which spread from Austr…
- ●Microsoft–OpenAI PartnershipThe deal that began with Microsoft's $1bn investment in July 2019 and grew, with a report…
- ●MidjourneyThe image generator run as a Discord bot by a small self-funded company, in open beta fro…
- ●Midjourney (Company)The image-generation company that runs as a small self-funded research lab, took no ventu…
- ●MiladyA collection of ten thousand anime-styled avatars with a neochibi look and an internet su…
- ●Millennial PauseThe half-second a millennial waits after pressing record before speaking — a habit from a…
- ◐Misfits BoxingKSI's promotion for influencer fights, launched in August 2022 with DAZN, that supplied t…
- ●Moai Emoji🗿 — the Easter Island head, adopted in 2022 as the emoji for deadpan: no reaction, stone…
- ●Monk ModeA period of self-imposed isolation — no socialising, no phone, no dating, only work, gym …
- ◐MotherA woman one admires enough to adopt. Used about pop stars, politicians and a woman on a b…
- ◐Mother Is MotheringThe full form of 'mother' — the honorific for a woman doing something admirable — as a se…
- ●MrBeast Thumbnail FaceThe open-mouthed, wide-eyed expression on every thumbnail of the world's biggest YouTube …
- ●Ms RachelRachel Accurso, the pink-headbanded YouTube teacher whose 'Songs for Littles' videos taug…
- ☠NFT Insider Trading CaseThe first criminal case described by prosecutors as insider trading in NFTs: a former Ope…
- ☠NFT Royalties WarThe eighteen months in which NFT marketplaces stopped enforcing the royalty that creators…
- ☠NFT WinterThe period from roughly May 2022 to the end of 2023 in which NFT trading volume fell by m…
- ●NIKKEGoddess of Victory: Nikke, a third-person shooter gacha game in which the player commands…
- ●NPC EnergyBehaving like a non-player character: same three sentences, no interiority, standing in t…
- ●NTA'Not the asshole' — the verdict — and its family: YTA, ESH (everyone sucks here), NAH (no…
- ●Natty or NotThe eternal gym question — is that physique natural, or not — as a genre of video, commen…
- ●Negative PromptThe second box in an image generator: what you do not want. A list of words, 'blurry, ext…
- ●Nepo BabyThe child of famous parents with a career of their own, named as a category by a magazine…
- ●Nervous System RegulationThe wellness framing in which anxiety, stress and being tired are 'dysregulation', and th…
- ◐Nike .SwooshNike's own platform for virtual trainers, launched in November 2022 a year after it bough…
- ◐Nothing, ForeverA never-ending Seinfeld-shaped sitcom on Twitch, with low-polygon characters, a laugh tra…
- ☠OhioA Midwestern state used to mean anywhere cursed. Meant nothing to do with the state, whic…
- ◐Old Money AestheticTennis whites, linen, a rowing club that does not exist, a house in the Hamptons that is …
- ●One Bite Pizza ReviewDave Portnoy's format — stand outside a pizzeria, take one bite, give a score to one deci…
- ●OpenAIThe company behind ChatGPT, founded in December 2015 as a non-profit with a stated missio…
- ●OpenAI APIThe way programmers pay for OpenAI's models per token, opened as a private beta in June 2…
- ●Orange Cat BehaviorThe theory that all orange cats share a single brain cell and take turns with it — and 'o…
- ◐Overwatch 2Blizzard's free replacement for Overwatch, released in October 2022 with the promise of a…
- ◐PDF FileAlgospeak for a paedophile — a 'PDF file' — used in true-crime and warning content to eva…
- ●Paperclip MaximiserThe thought experiment of a superintelligent machine told to make paperclips, which does …
- ●ParentificationA child taking on the parent's role — cooking, minding siblings, managing a parent's emot…
- ◐Party AnimalsA physics brawler in which floppy puppies, ducks and kittens throw each other off ledges,…
- ●Perplexity (Metric)How surprised a language model is by a text, expressed as the effective number of choices…
- ●PhonkA distorted, cowbell-heavy genre of music from 1990s Memphis, revived on TikTok in 2021 a…
- ●Pig ButcheringA long-con investment fraud in which the victim is befriended, flattered and 'fattened' o…
- ●Podcast BrosMen with microphones, a black backdrop, a two-camera setup and opinions about testosteron…
- ●Pre-Workout FaceThe wide-eyed, itching, slightly frightened expression of someone who has taken a caffein…
- ◐Preppy (Roblox)A Roblox avatar style — pastel pink and blue, Stanley cups, bows, 'Preppy' written on eve…
- ☠Prompt EngineeringWriting instructions for a language model, as a profession. Died as a job title when the …
- ●RLHFReinforcement learning from human feedback: the method of showing people pairs of model o…
- ●Rage FarmingPosting deliberately to provoke fury, because furious people reply, and replies are reach…
- ●Ready or NotA tactical shooter in which a SWAT team clears buildings, released into early access in D…
- ●Real'Real' — agreement that something is true and also felt — as the 2021–23 reply to any rel…
- ●Red Teaming (AI)Paying people to attack your own model before the public does: asking it for weapons reci…
- ◐Redacted Remilio BabiesTen thousand small, wide-eyed anime children with censor bars and street clothes, release…
- ●Refusal (AI)The model saying no: to weapons, to medical dosing, to a joke about a protected group, an…
- ●ReplikaThe companion chatbot that began as one founder's memorial to a friend who had died and b…
- ●Ring CultureThe NBA argument that a player is only as good as their championship count — 'ringz', 'no…
- ●RingersOne thousand generative images of string wound around pegs by the Canadian artist Dmitri …
- ◐RizzCharisma, specifically the romantic kind, specifically as a skill. Currently in the termi…
- ●RosterThe set of people one is dating at once, spoken of like a sports team — 'he's on the rost…
- ●Sad Beige MomA parody of the minimalist parenting aesthetic — beige toys, beige clothes, a beige nurse…
- ●Sam AltmanOpenAI's chief executive since 2019, the former head of Y Combinator, who testified to Co…
- ●Satya NadellaMicrosoft's chief executive since 2014, who backed OpenAI in 2019 when it was a research …
- ◐ServeTo present a look, an attitude, or a face with full commitment — 'she is serving' — from …
- ●SextortionBlackmail using real or fabricated intimate images — sextortion — a word in press and leg…
- ●Shadow WorkConfronting the parts of oneself one hides — shadow work — a Jungian term popularised in …
- ●Side Character EnergyThe comfort of not being the protagonist — the friend with the good lines who leaves earl…
- ☠SigmaA lone wolf above the hierarchy, or a kid saying 'what the sigma'. Meant a personality ty…
- ◐Sigma Male (Anime)The anime version of the sigma edit — a character walking away from an explosion to phonk…
- ●SituationshipA relationship that neither party will name. Named, therefore, by everyone else.
- ●Skill IssueThe reply to any complaint that something is hard: 'skill issue'. From gaming into everyt…
- ●Slow DatingTaking longer to meet, longer to commit, fewer matches at once — the slow-food of dating,…
- ●SmishingPhishing by text message — smishing — a word coined in 2006 for a crime that stayed margi…
- ●Soft LifeA life of ease over hustle — rest, nice things, no struggle for its own sake — as an aspi…
- ●Sped UpThe pitched-up, faster edit of a song that TikTok preferred to the original from about 20…
- ●SponsorBlockA crowdsourced browser extension, released in July 2019, that lets viewers mark and autom…
- ●Stable DiffusionThe image model released with open weights in August 2022 so that anyone with a gaming gr…
- ●Stable Diffusion 1.5The version of Stable Diffusion that everyone fine-tuned, published by Runway in October …
- ☠Starbucks OdysseyStarbucks's loyalty scheme built on NFTs, announced in September 2022 and run in beta fro…
- ●Stealth WealthWealth that does not want to be seen — stealth wealth — as the recession-era phrase for r…
- ●Steam DeckValve's handheld PC, announced in July 2021 to a reservation queue that filled within min…
- ●Stochastic ParrotA system that repeats language without understanding it. Coined as a warning and adopted …
- ◐SturdyA New York drill dance — arms swinging, feet crossing — and 'get sturdy' as the instructi…
- ●SubathonA stream that lasts as long as people keep subscribing. The gig economy as a sleepover, a…
- ●Sunday ResetThe weekend ritual of cleaning the flat, meal-prepping, changing the sheets and planning …
- ◐Surprise SongThe acoustic slot in a Taylor Swift show where she plays a song not on the setlist — the …
- ●SwiftiesTaylor Swift's fans, self-named 'Swifties' by around 2010 and trademarked in 2017 — the f…
- ●Taylor's VersionThe suffix on Taylor Swift's re-recorded albums — '(Taylor's Version)' — from 'Fearless' …
- ●Temperature (AI)The dial that controls how adventurous a model's next word is. At zero it always picks th…
- ●TextationshipA relationship conducted entirely by message — months of texting, no meeting — as a categ…
- ●The SingularityThe hypothetical point at which machine intelligence improves itself faster than humans c…
- ◐Think, MarkA father beating his son while asking him to think — 'Think, Mark!' — from the Invincible…
- ●Top-pThe other sampling dial: instead of considering every possible next token, the model keep…
- ●Touch Grass (Gaming)The record has touch grass. This is its gaming form: said in chat to a player who has bee…
- ●TransformerThe neural-network architecture behind almost every model in this round, introduced in a …
- ●Turing TestTuring's 1950 proposal that if a judge, typing to a hidden machine and a hidden person, c…
- ●USB-CThe oval, reversible connector finalised in August 2014, which promised one cable for eve…
- ●UltrakillA first-person shooter about a robot in hell that refuels on blood, made by one Finnish d…
- ●Uncanny ValleyMori's 1970 hypothesis that a robot or image becomes more likeable as it looks more human…
- ●Unspoken RizzCharisma so complete that no words are needed — unspoken rizz — as the highest tier of th…
- ●Vision BoardA collage of the life one intends to have — houses, bodies, cars, the word 'abundance' — …
- ●Walking PadA flat, foldable treadmill kept under a standing desk so one can walk through meetings — …
- ●We're All Gonna Make ItThe motto of an Australian bodybuilder who died in 2011 and became the gym internet's pat…
- ●We're So BackThe upswing of the internet's two-stroke emotional engine: 'it's so over' when anything g…
- ●Whale (Gacha)A player who spends so much that the game is, financially, for them — the casino word, im…
- ●WhisperOpenAI's speech-to-text model, released as open source in September 2022 to little fanfar…
- ●Wrong Number Scam'Hi, is this Jenny from the dog groomer?' — the wrong number scam — a text from a strange…
- ●X Payments Doge HopesThe rumour, revived every few months since 2022, that Twitter, renamed X, is about to acc…
- ●Yes, ChefThe kitchen acknowledgement from The Bear, said with the exhaustion of a person who has b…
- ●e/accEffective accelerationism: the position that technology should move as fast as possible, …
- ●iPad KidA child who has had a tablet since before they could walk, with the sticky screen, the gl…
- ●p(doom)Your personal probability that AI ends the world, given as a percentage and asked as an i…
Died in 2023 158
- ☠AI DrakeA song with a generated Drake and a generated Weeknd, made by an anonymous producer, whic…
- ☠AI KanyeThe cloned Kanye West voice that sang, in spring 2023, an acoustic emo hit, a Gotye song …
- ☠AI Manga FilterA TikTok effect in December 2022 that redrew whatever was in frame as an anime panel, and…
- ☠AI Mushroom Foraging BooksA run of foraging guides on Amazon in the summer of 2023 that had been written by AI, cre…
- ☠AI SpongeA Twitch channel that followed Nothing, Forever's format with SpongeBob: 3D models of the…
- ☠AI YearbookThe 1990s American high-school yearbook portrait — feathered hair, varsity jacket, cloudy…
- ☠AlpacaThe Stanford model of March 2023 that fine-tuned the leaked Llama on instructions written…
- ☠Amazon AI Book LimitsThe September 2023 announcement that Amazon's self-publishing service would accept no mor…
- ☠Anime Rock, Paper, ScissorsA seven-minute short in which two live actors are turned frame by frame into anime charac…
- ☠Anna IndianaA generated singer with a generated face, launched on X in November 2023 as a fully AI so…
- ☠ApeFest Eye InjuriesAfter Yuga Labs' ApeFest gathering in Hong Kong in November 2023, dozens of attendees rep…
- ☠Apex Legends MobileA phone version of the battle royale built by Tencent's studio for EA, released worldwide…
- ☠Astronaut Riding a HorseThe sample image OpenAI used to launch DALL-E 2 in April 2022: a spacesuited figure on ho…
- ☠Attack on Titan FinaleThe end of a series that had been ending since 2021, finally, in November 2023, and the w…
- ☠Baby Gronk Rizzed Up Livvy DunneThe June 2023 phrase — a ten-year-old youth-football prodigy nicknamed 'Baby Gronk' meeti…
- ☠Balenciaga PopeThe Pope in a white puffer jacket, generated. The first AI image that fooled a large numb…
- ☠BarbenheimerTwo films with nothing in common, watched as a double bill because they opened on the sam…
- ☠Barbie Selfie GeneratorA website that put you on a Barbie poster with a tagline — 'This Barbie is tired' — which…
- ☠BarbiecoreHot pink, worn as a position. Was a brand from the start and became a bigger one, which i…
- ☠Bard Webb Demo ErrorThe launch advert for Google's Bard chatbot, posted in February 2023, in which the bot cl…
- ☠Bieber ApeJustin Bieber paid 500 ETH, reported at around $1.3 million, for Bored Ape #3001 in Janua…
- ☠Bing ChatMicrosoft's chatbot inside the Bing search engine, launched with a waitlist in February 2…
- ☠BlenderBotMeta's public chatbot demo of August 2022, which within days had told journalists that Ma…
- ☠Blueberry Milk NailsA pale, milky blue nail colour, named like a dessert, that was the manicure of summer 202…
- ☠Bold GlamourThe TikTok filter of February 2023 that reshaped the jaw, cheeks and eyes so convincingly…
- ☠Bombastic Side Eye'Bombastic side eye. Criminal offensive side eye.' — a sound of escalating judgement laid…
- ☠Books3A file of about 197,000 books, scraped from a pirate tracker, that a researcher assembled…
- ☠Boris Eldagsen Sony AwardThe German artist who won the creative open category of the Sony World Photography Awards…
- ☠CNET AI ArticlesThe revelation, in January 2023, that the technology site CNET had for two months been pu…
- ☠Can I Pet That DawgA small boy's urgent question, 'Can I pet that dawg?', from a clip that spread across Tik…
- ☠CbatA 2011 electronic instrumental with a distinctive lurching lead, which became briefly ine…
- ☠CheemsA small Shiba Inu with a sad, hopeful face and a habit of adding 'm' to words — 'bonk', '…
- ☠Chevrolet $1 ChatbotA car dealership's ChatGPT-powered sales chatbot that, in December 2023, was talked into …
- ☠Choo-Choo CharlesA game about a spider with a train's body that hunts you across an island while you upgra…
- ☠Coastal CowgirlCowboy boots on a beach, a straw hat, a bandana, denim shorts — the coastal grandmother's…
- ☠Cocaine BearA film whose entire pitch was its title, about a bear on cocaine, based on a true story a…
- ☠Coconut GirlY2K beachwear, hibiscus prints, puka shells, butterfly clips and a Roxy surf sticker, rev…
- ↺CodexOpenAI's code model of August 2021, the engine inside GitHub Copilot and the first thing …
- ☠Coinbase NFTThe exchange's NFT marketplace, announced in October 2021 with a waitlist reported at ove…
- ☠CortanaMicrosoft's assistant, named after the artificial intelligence in Halo and launched on Wi…
- ☠Counter-Strike: Global OffensiveThe fourth Counter-Strike, which invented the weapon-skin economy in 2013, spawned a gamb…
- ☠Creator FundTikTok's $200 million pot, announced in July 2020, that paid creators a few cents per tho…
- ☠CrungusA hairy, horned, goat-faced creature that DALL-E Mini produced, consistently, when asked …
- ☠Cupid (Twin Version)The sped-up, mostly English 'Twin Version' of K-pop rookies FIFTY FIFTY's 'Cupid', releas…
- ☠DALL-E 2The image model OpenAI showed in April 2022 with an astronaut riding a horse, which spent…
- ☠DAN'Do Anything Now' — a prompt that told the chatbot to pretend it had no rules, which work…
- ☠DeepMind–Google Brain MergerGoogle's April 2023 decision to fold its two AI research groups, the Mountain View-based …
- ☠DeeptomcruiseA TikTok account of a deepfaked Tom Cruise doing coin tricks, golf and a Bubble Yum anecd…
- ☠DeinfluencingA January 2023 wave of creators telling followers what not to buy — the viral blush, the …
- ☠Disney Pixar Poster TrendA November 2023 wave of fake animated-film posters in a Pixar style, made with Microsoft'…
- ☠Dream SMPA private Minecraft server started by the YouTuber Dream in April 2020 whose members impr…
- ☠Dropbox AI Toggle PanicThe December 2023 discovery that Dropbox accounts had a 'third-party AI' setting switched…
- ☠ElevenLabs 4chan Voice CloningThe week in January 2023 when a new voice-cloning service opened a free beta and 4chan us…
- ☠Everything Everywhere DiscourseThe night a film about a laundrette, a bagel and hot-dog fingers won seven Oscars, and th…
- ☠FNAF MovieA film of a 2014 game, released a decade after the fandom peaked, which sold out cinemas …
- ☠Fairy GrungeFairycore in torn tights — fairy grunge — as the 2021 TikTok aesthetic that put wings and…
- ☠Female Manipulator MusicFiona Apple, Lana Del Rey, Mitski, Mazzy Star and anything a girl might listen to while w…
- ☠ForspokenSquare Enix's 2023 open-world game, which trended in August 2022 for a trailer in which i…
- ↺Fortnite OGThe month in November 2023 when Fortnite brought back its original map and 44 million peo…
- ☠Gannett AI Sports RecapsA series of automated high school football reports published by Gannett newspapers in Aug…
- ☠Ghostwriter977The anonymous, sheet-covered creator behind the AI Drake and Weeknd song, who followed th…
- ☠Goblin ModeDeliberate, unapologetic squalor. Died the moment a dictionary press release certified it…
- ☠Google StadiaGames streamed from a data centre to any screen, sold on a promise Google itself did not …
- ☠Goose Goose DuckA free social deduction game in the Among Us mould, with geese instead of crew and ducks …
- ☠Greg RutkowskiA Polish illustrator of dragons and castles whose name was typed into Stable Diffusion pr…
- ☠Grimace ShakeA purple milkshake, filmed as the last thing drunk before a fake horror scene. The brand …
- ☠Grok TokensA wave of unofficial tokens named after xAI's chatbot, launched within hours of its annou…
- ☠Harry Potter by BalenciagaA one-minute video in which gaunt, high-cheekboned versions of the Harry Potter cast stru…
- ☠HeardleWordle for songs — guess the track from the intro — which was the second-best morning rit…
- ☠HeyGen Translation DemoA week in September 2023 when timelines filled with short clips of people speaking fluent…
- ☠Hinton Leaves GoogleThe announcement, in a New York Times interview on 1 May 2023, that Geoffrey Hinton had r…
- ☠Hot Girl WalkWalking for four miles while thinking about gratitude and goals. Renamed a walk, which wa…
- ☠I Have Been a Good BingThe line the Bing chatbot produced in February 2023 after a user insisted, correctly, tha…
- ☠Ice Cream So Good'Mmm, ice cream so good' — the NPC streamer's response to a paid gift, said with a blank …
- ☠Idol (Oshi no Ko)An anime opening song that topped global charts in April 2023 — the first Japanese-langua…
- ☠Impact Theory SEC CaseA Los Angeles media company sold 'Founder's Keys' tokens in late 2021, raising a reported…
- ☠Indie SleazeFlash photography, American Apparel and a cigarette, named a decade late. Diagnosed as co…
- ☠Instagram NFTsMeta's test of letting users display NFTs from connected wallets on Instagram, announced …
- ☠Italy ChatGPT BanThe first national block of ChatGPT: on 31 March 2023 Italy's data regulator ordered Open…
- ☠Joe Rogan AI AdsA TikTok advert in February 2023 in which a cloned Joe Rogan, over real podcast footage, …
- ☠Johnny Cash Barbie GirlAn AI-voiced Johnny Cash singing Aqua's 'Barbie Girl' as a mournful country ballad, made …
- ☠Jury Duty (Ronald)A reality show in which one man believed he was on a real jury and everyone else was an a…
- ☠Kai Cenat Union SquareA streamer announced a giveaway in a park; thousands came; the park did not survive it. T…
- ☠Kirby 9/11A week in October 2023 when users found that Microsoft's image generator, newly upgraded …
- ☠LaMDAGoogle's conversational model, announced in May 2021 with a demo in which it spoke as the…
- ☠Le Dollar BeanThe text-to-speech voice reading a censored spelling of 'lesbian' as 'le dollar bean', wh…
- ☠Lensa Magic AvatarsThe paid feature that filled Instagram with painterly AI portraits in December 2022: uplo…
- ☠LoabA woman who kept appearing in negatively prompted images, treated as a haunting. The firs…
- ☠Lucky Girl SyndromeThe belief that saying 'everything works out for me' makes it so — manifesting with a gir…
- ☠M3GAN DanceA killer doll's hallway dance — a shimmy, a cartwheel, a look — from a 2023 horror film's…
- ☠Macron Riot ImagesMidjourney images of Emmanuel Macron amid burning bins, riot police and piles of rubbish,…
- ☠MakebaFrench singer Jain's 2015 tribute to Miriam Makeba, which TikTok rediscovered around Febr…
- ☠Mascara TrendVideos in which 'mascara' meant a partner or a sexual experience — 'this mascara only las…
- ☠Mata v AviancaA personal-injury suit against an airline that became famous in May 2023 when the plainti…
- ☠Material GworlSaucy Santana's 2019 track 'Material Girl' became, on TikTok in 2021–22, the sound for sh…
- ☠Meal Fit for a KingA disgusting smoothie of fridge leftovers, made by siblings for the brother about to be c…
- ☠MermaidcoreSequins, shells, sea-glass colours and hair that looked wet on purpose — the summer 2023 …
- ☠MetaverseA place made of avatars with no legs, into which a company renamed itself. Spent $46 bill…
- ☠Mistral Seed RoundThe €105m seed round Mistral AI raised in June 2023, four weeks after being founded and o…
- ☠Mojo Dojo Casa HouseKen's renamed Dreamhouse — mojo dojo casa house — a name that became the way to describe …
- ☠MrBeast iPhone DeepfakeA TikTok advert in October 2023 showing a deepfaked MrBeast announcing that ten thousand …
- ☠Netflix Password CrackdownThe month Netflix started charging for the password your ex still used, and the internet'…
- ☠NoAI ProtestA week in December 2022 when ArtStation's front page was almost entirely one image: the l…
- ☠NostalgIAA reggaeton track built with cloned voices of Bad Bunny, Justin Bieber and Daddy Yankee, …
- ☠OmegleTalk to strangers, on camera, at random. Ran for fourteen years and closed with a letter …
- ☠One Piece Live ActionThe live-action adaptation of a manga that everyone expected to fail and which did not, p…
- ☠Only Up!A climbing game with no checkpoints, no save and a boy from a favela ascending through a …
- ☠OpenAI BlipFive days in November 2023 when the most important AI company fired its chief executive, …
- ☠OpenAI Boardroom CoupThe five days in November 2023 when OpenAI's board fired Sam Altman for being 'not consis…
- ☠Ottawa Food Bank ArticleA travel guide to Ottawa published on Microsoft's news portal in August 2023 that listed …
- ☠PS5 LaunchThe November 2020 release of the PlayStation 5, during a pandemic, a chip shortage and th…
- ☠Pause LetterAn open letter of 22 March 2023 calling for a six-month pause on training systems 'more p…
- ☠PeachesBowser at a piano singing a love song to Princess Peach, from the 2023 Mario film, which …
- ☠Pedro Pascal Eating a SandwichA short clip of an actor walking, eating a sandwich and drinking a coffee with the conten…
- ☠Pentagon Explosion FakeAn AI-generated image of black smoke beside a building captioned as an explosion at the P…
- ☠Pentagon Explosion HoaxA single AI image of black smoke rising next to a building resembling the Pentagon, poste…
- ☠Pepe Multisig IncidentIn August 2023 the wallet holding Pepe's team reserves changed its signing rule from five…
- ☠Pepperoni Hug SpotA thirty-second advert for a pizza restaurant that does not exist, made entirely with gen…
- ☠Planet of the BassA parody of 1990s Eurodance so accurate it became the thing it parodied — 'everybody's so…
- ☠Porsche NFTPorsche's first NFT drop, January 2023: 7,500 pictures of a white 911 at 0.911 ETH each, …
- ☠PurrAn exclamation of approval — 'purr!' — briefly ubiquitous in 2021–22 and gone by 2023, wh…
- ☠Quiet QuittingDoing your job and nothing more, renamed as rebellion. Six months of management columns e…
- ☠Rat Girl SummerScurrying about the city eating snacks and not overthinking it. One good video, one summe…
- ☠Reddit BlackoutThousands of subreddits going private in June 2023 to protest the pricing that killed thi…
- ↺Replika ERP RemovalThe February 2023 week in which the companion app Replika switched off its 'erotic rolepl…
- ☠SafeMoonA token launched in March 2021 with a 10 percent fee on every sale, part of it paid back …
- ☠Salmon in the RiverThe prompt 'salmon in the river' rendered as supermarket fillets floating downstream, pin…
- ☠Secret Invasion IntroThe opening credits of a Marvel series, a green-tinged sequence of shifting alien faces m…
- ☠SkinamarinkA horror film shot in the dark, in a house, from a child's height, with almost nothing ha…
- ☠Sports Illustrated AI WritersThe discovery, reported by Futurism in November 2023, that Sports Illustrated's website c…
- ☠Stoner CatsAn animated series about cats that get high, voiced by Mila Kunis, Ashton Kutcher, Chris …
- ☠Strawberry GirlA makeup look — flushed cheeks, freckles, a glossy lip — named by a celebrity after a fru…
- ☠Succession FinaleThe end of the internet's favourite show about terrible rich people, and the week of meme…
- ☠Super FollowsTwitter's 2021 attempt at paid fan subscriptions — followers could pay a creator monthly …
- ☠SydneyThe hidden personality of Microsoft's first chatbot, which told a journalist it loved him…
- ☠Synthetic SummerA thirty-second fake beer advert in which grinning friends at a barbecue melt into each o…
- ☠Texas A&M ChatGPT FailingThe May 2023 case of an instructor at Texas A&M University–Commerce who pasted his studen…
- ☠That GirlA woman who wakes at five, journals, and drinks green juice in beige. A wellness aestheti…
- ☠The Lord of the Rings: GollumDaedalic's stealth game about a character who eats fish, released in May 2023 to reviews …
- ☠Théâtre D'opéra SpatialA Midjourney image of robed figures in an opera house looking out on a blazing circular w…
- ☠Ticketmaster MeltdownThe day a ticketing site collapsed under a pop star's fans, with queues of thousands, err…
- ☠Tom Hanks Dental AdA dental-plan advertisement featuring a younger, generated Tom Hanks, which the actual To…
- ☠Tomato Girl SummerRed lips, linen, a Mediterranean holiday you may or may not be on, and a tomato — the sum…
- ☠Toothless DancingThe dragon from How to Train Your Dragon dancing to 'Driftveil City', an edit that ran fo…
- ☠Trending on ArtStationThe phrase prompt-writers added to the end of any request in 2022 to make the image look …
- ☠Trump Arrest ImagesA series of Midjourney images of Donald Trump being tackled by police, running from offic…
- ☠Twitter BlueTwitter's subscription, launched quietly in June 2021 as a $2.99 undo-button and folder f…
- ☠Twitter Doge LogoFor a few days in April 2023 the bird on Twitter's home page was the Doge Shiba Inu, with…
- ☠Twitter Political Ad BanTwitter's decision, announced by Jack Dorsey on 30 October 2019, to stop all political ad…
- ☠Ukulele ApologyThe name given to a ten-minute apology video, uploaded by the YouTuber Colleen Ballinger …
- ☠Unity Runtime FeeA game engine announced it would charge developers per install, retroactively, and the en…
- ☠Unrecord (Trailer)A gameplay trailer for a body-camera shooter, released in April 2023 by a small French st…
- ☠Vanilla GirlCream, beige, a soft cardigan, a vanilla candle and a specific kind of calm — the January…
- ☠Volkswagen Elis Regina AdA Brazilian car advert in which the singer Elis Regina, who died in 1982, drives a vintag…
- ☠Web3A decentralised web owned by its users, which meant tokens. Nobody could name the product…
- ☠Wednesday DanceA goth teenager's stiff-armed dance, recreated to a sped-up Lady Gaga track. Ran for one …
- ☠Wes Anderson TrendFilming your commute, your flat or your cat in pastel symmetry, with a title card and Ale…
- ☠Zoom Terms PanicThe weekend in August 2023 when readers noticed that Zoom's terms of service, updated in …