2023 was a year of AI hype, but don't let them convince you it's inevitable

Writer Ilana Pena holds her sign on the picket line on the fourth day of the strike by the Writers Guild of America in front of Netflix in Hollywood, California, on May 5, 2023. - The Hollywood writers' strike broke out this week over pay, but the refusal of studios like Netflix and Disney to rule out artificial intelligence replacing human scribes in the future has only fueled anger and fear on the picket lines. With their rapidly advancing ability to eerily mimic human conversation, AI programs like ChatGPT have spooked many industries recently.

Are you tired? I'm tired. It seems like every year we get a new main villain. Last year it was NFTs: apes, slurp juice, whatever the hell Square Enix is doing and what-have-you. This year? Artificial intelligence is here to threaten us all with ultra-processed sludge in place of human creativity.

And it all seems so inevitable. NFTs felt like a kind of infection, a fever stemming from addled CEOs and shareholders trying to wring another buck out of their various franchises. They've not been defeated, but we as a people were at least able to bully them to the point that game companies were far more reticent about them this year.