The Machine Passed the Vibe Check

ChatGPT launched quietly in late November 2022 and by January 2023 it had more users than Instagram's first year, which is impressive for something that is essentially a very articulate text box. The discourse went from "neat party trick" to "this will replace all human labor" in approximately six days, with the truth landing somewhere nobody could agree on. Students used it to write essays. Lawyers used it to cite cases that didn't exist. Journalists wrote think pieces about whether AI would replace journalists, using AI to help them write faster, which was either ironic or efficient depending on your perspective. Silicon Valley pivoted so hard toward AI that the collective whiplash was audible from the metaverse, which everyone had already forgotten about. For a brief, strange moment, a chatbot became the main character of the global economy. Companies that had been "blockchain-first" six months earlier were suddenly "AI-native." The term "prompt engineering" became a job title. The future arrived, and it was mostly people arguing about it on Twitter.