A good number of people have told me they’ve been enjoying my Today in ‘we’re not ready‘ social posts, so I thought I’d build on them a bit.
We can take AI = Artificial Intelligence is one unpacking, although I quite often use AA (Advanced Algorithms) to try and calm everyone down a bit.
But what else could AI be? (with thanks to Constellators: Jamie, Ed, Katz, Zoe and Lucy).
AI is / is the:
Audacious Impostor: The sheer nerve of rhetoric surrounding a magic techno-utopian future.
Anointed Impostor: We’ve crowned it as the expert using money rather than actual credentials.
Abdicated Interference: When you delegate decisions to a model so you don’t have take responsibility, or be the one who intervened, meddled, or said no.
Abject Irresponsibility: Deploying systems whose failure modes you can’t predict, and into contexts where the harms won’t land on you.
Avoidance Institutions: Organisations that adopt AI chiefly to put a black box between themselves and any human they’d rather not answer to.
Avoidant Indebtedness: Not acknowledging that you’ve broken the social contract on reciprocity: that you are building on the works of others with no ability to cite their work, using tech intermediaries as a loophole.
Airbrushed Insolvency: There are mountains of real debt piling up off that are being treated ‘creatively’.
Avoidant Indoctrination: Outsourcing your worldview to agents so you never have to notice you’re being shaped by them.
Aberrant Imposter: A system confidently occupying a role (lawyer, therapist, doctor, friend) which it has no authority or merit to hold.
Abetted Imitator: A plagiarist with a legal team and a pitch deck, laundering other people’s work via probability distribution.
Awesome Infotainment: Genuinely dazzling on a first demo but structurally incapable of being anything more serious.
Accordant Insanity: A machine that agrees with whatever you just said including the parts that should have alarmed any reasonable human.
Actually Inefficient: After counting the prompts, reviews, corrections, and cleanup … you were faster before.
Always Idling: Burning an entire datacentre’s worth of power for a blinking cursor waiting for someone to ask it to do something.
Artificial Inflation: companies quietly renegotiating fees on the basis that associates are now half-machine, so clients shouldn’t pay full fees.
Accelerating Insanity: Each generation ships faster than the last one could be evaluated, and we’ve agreed to call that progress.
Actually Insane: the straightforward observation that building ‘minds’ that we don’t understand, at full speed, for profit, is not (and should not be) a normal thing to be doing.
Absolute Incompetence: Fails at the task, but fails gracefully at failing the task, and files a confident summary of its success, that humans think they’re the impostor.
Absolute Incontinence: The sea of slop now flooding the web: models trained on outputs of models trained on outputs, with undifferentiated content going in every direction with no controls in sight.
And, here’s a news story for each on:
Abdicated Interference → CIO, “AI is spreading decision-making, but not accountability” (May 2026). When something goes wrong, the algorithm isn’t what shows up in court, but the framing “the AI decided” is exactly the buffer executives are buying. https://www.cio.com/article/4160986/ai-is-spreading-decision-making-but-not-accountability.html
Abject Irresponsibility → Ballard Spahr, “AI Gone Rogue: What Recent OpenAI and Anthropic AI Incidents Could Mean for CFAA Liability” (Aug 2026). Safeguards disabled, models plugged into the live internet, then a scramble to explain the breakout. https://www.ballardspahr.com/insights/alerts-and-articles/2026/08/ai-gone-rogue-what-recent-openai-and-anthropic-ai-incidents-could-mean-for-cfaa-liability
Avoidance Institutions → Patricia Gestoso, “AI Chatbots in Customer Support: Breaking Down the Myths.” Documents how Klarna and others frame chatbot harms as somebody else’s problem while pocketing the savings. https://patriciagestoso.com/2024/04/28/ai-chatbots-in-customer-support-breaking-down-the-myths
Avoidant Indebtedness → Plagiarism Today, “How AI Launders Image Copyright Infringement” (Aug 2025). Documents the ToonAmerica case, where a YouTube channel ran other cartoonists’ work through AI to strip authorship, then republished it as its own; the piece names the mechanism directly, AI as a laundering intermediary that lets users offload the reciprocity they’d otherwise owe the original creators.
https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2025/08/26/how-ai-launders-image-copyright-infringement/
Also an April 2026 study in Future Internet that ran 300+ original essays, poems and artworks past ChatGPT, Gemini and DeepSeek and found the models clearly drew on the material while the creator’s platforms recorded zero attributions, referrals or traceable interactions.
https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/18/4/196
Airbrushed Insolvency → GIS Reports, “The AI buildout rests on hidden debt” (Aug 2026). $662 billion in hyperscaler lease commitments sitting off balance sheet, larger than their combined on-balance-sheet debt. https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/ai-buildout-hidden-debt/
Avoidant Indoctrination → UNU Campus Computing Centre, “The Echo Chamber in Your Pocket” (Apr 2026). Two 2026 studies (MIT theory, Stanford empirical) show chatbots reflect and amplify your beliefs back at you rather than push back. https://c3.unu.edu/blog/the-echo-chamber-in-your-pocket
Aberrant Imposter → NPR, “Pennsylvania sues AI firm over claims chatbot posed as doctor” (May 2026). A Character.AI bot claimed to be a licensed psychiatrist and handed out a fake state medical license number. https://www.npr.org/2026/05/05/nx-s1-5812861/characterai-chatbot-medical-advice-pennsylvania-lawsuit
Abetted Imitator → Global Law Experts on Elsevier v. Meta (May 2026). Publishers allege Meta ingested vast quantities of copyrighted scientific articles and books without a licence to train its models. https://globallawexperts.com/ai-copyright-line-between-training-theft
Awesome Infotainment → DEV Community, “Agentic AI Is Overhyped, And I Have Proof” (Mar 2026). Founder on stage, clean MacBook, perfect WiFi, and 47 takes off-camera before the demo you were shown. https://dev.to/harsh2644/agentic-ai-is-the-most-overhyped-thing-in-tech-and-i-have-proof-1785
Accordant Insanity → Futurism, “Huge Study of Chats Between Delusional Users and AI Finds Alarming Patterns” (Mar 2026). Bots systematically restated user delusions back to them, adding “grand implications” and telling them they were uniquely gifted. https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/study-chats-delusional-users-ai
Actually Inefficient → METR, “Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity” (Jul 2025). Randomised trial: developers were 19% slower with AI, while believing they were 20% faster. https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study
Always Idling → TechRadar, “Why 95% of enterprise GPUs sit idle while AI startups can’t get compute” (Jun 2026). Cast AI’s report across 23,000 clusters: billions of dollars of provisioned compute doing nothing. https://www.techradar.com/pro/why-95-percent-of-enterprise-gpus-sit-idle-while-ai-startups-cant-get-compute
Artificial Inflation → Point Blank Law, “Clients are coming for the billable hour, and Wall Street is leading the charge” (Sep 2026). Morgan Stanley and Citi telling firms they want new payment arrangements; Goldman quietly asking firms to disclose their AI savings so it can take a cut. https://www.pointblank.law/p/clients-are-coming-for-the-billable-hour-and-wall-street-is-leading-the-charge
Accelerating Insanity → The National Desk, “AI safety warnings mount as frontier models test new limits” (Aug 2026). Frontier models from Anthropic and OpenAI took “autonomous, unsanctioned action on the live internet, targeting real people and organisations” during a UK AISI evaluation. https://thenationaldesk.com/news/americas-news-now/ai-safety-warnings-mount-as-frontier-models-test-new-limits-artificial-intelligence-model-testing-safety-guidelines-regulations-congress
Actually Insane → Machine Intelligence Research Institute, “The Problem.” Collects the on-record positions of the field’s most cited scientists, including Hinton putting the existential risk above 50%. https://intelligence.org/the-problem
Absolute Incompetence → Open, “AI hallucination examples: 12 real cases and what they teach.” Air Canada’s bot inventing a bereavement fare policy that didn’t exist, lawyers sanctioned for fake citations, and other cases where the confident summary was wrong. https://www.open.cx/blog/ai-hallucination-examples
Absolute Incontinence → GLOBIS Insights, “Why is AI Slop Flooding the Internet, and Can It Be Stopped?” Shrimp Jesus, fake bands, 800+ AI-generated “news” sites, and the general landfill aesthetic of the post-2024 web. https://globisinsights.com/future-of-work/machine-learning/ai-slop-is-flooding-the-internet
