Can we just have one day when no one mentions AI?

The gap between hype and reality is frustratingly wide and growing.

- Pilita Clark

On the first Monday of August, artificial intelligence made it into headlines around the world more than 2,100 times.

AI was reported to be scamming people in Malaysia; learning the Luganda language in Uganda; reshaping the Indian tech sector; and creating billionaires across the US and China.

It was a different story on the same Monday in August in 2024, when AI made it into only 764 headlines, according to a search of Factiva, a huge global database of newspapers, magazines and other sources.

The number was just 140 in 2022, and 110 in pandemic-struck 2020. Go back a decade to 2015 and there were only nine such headlines, two of which concerned the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.

The AI boom that followed the 2022 release of ChatGPT shows little sign of busting. But there are many times when I wish it would.

To be precise, I wish there were just one day—or even half a day—when I never read, heard or was asked about anything to do with AI.

It's not so much the depressing number of times one hears that the technology is killing jobs, making us dumber, making stuff up, supercharging fraud, stealing creative work and driving up carbon emissions as it enriches a cluster of tech giants.