Suddenly, there was the promise of a new technology — Large Language Models — that were getting exponentially more powerful, which was mostly a lie but hard to disprove because “powerful” can mean basically anything, and the definition of “powerful” depended entirely on whoever you asked at any given time, and what that person’s motivations were.

The media also immediately started tripping on its own feet, mistakenly claiming OpenAI’s GPT-4 model tricked a Taskrabbit into solving a CAPTCHA (it didn’t — this never happened), or saying that “people who don’t know how to code already [used] bots to produce full-fledged games,” and if you’re wondering what “full-fledged” means, it means “pong” and a cobbled-together rolling demo of SkyRoads, a game from 1993.

The media (and investors) helped peddle the narrative that AI was always getting better, could do basically anything, and that any problems you saw today would be inevitably solved in a few short months, or years, or, well, at some point I guess.