On the first Monday of this month, artificial intelligence (AI) 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 last year, 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.
Can we just have one day when no one mentions AI?
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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.
Nor is it the exploding valuations of said giants, and the $100 million signing bonuses they are now reportedly offering AI research stars.
It’s more that the rising tide of news about AI is manifestly failing to bring a commensurate level of insight about exactly how it is being used and what it will end up doing.
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In the nearly three years since ChatGPT’s launch, the gap between insider and amateur AI knowledge seems to be widening rather than narrowing.
Speaking as a confirmed amateur, I do not doubt the people in, say, professional services firms which claim AI-generated reports are saving thousands of hours of work, or the researchers which say it makes it much easier to spot abnormalities on chest X-rays.
I can see why the AI models of Nobel Prize-winning researchers might eventually help overcome a smorgasbord of scourges, from Parkinson’s disease to drug-resistant bacteria and plastic pollution.
The other day I spoke to the chief executive of the Gates Foundation, Mark Suzman, about reports that AI models in apps are giving poor farmers real-time help to grow and sell crops. He thinks such models will have a “transformative” effect in Asia and Africa.
The trouble is that all this still seems so remote from so much of what we read about AI, not to mention our lived experience of it.
Those Factiva database searches I did to check AI headline mentions took a bit of time, and required a paid subscription. But they produced verifiable, credible results.
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ChatGPT, on the other hand, took just seconds to misinform me that, on August 4th, 2025, “only one” headline in major news outlets explicitly included the term “AI”.
Moments like this make me worry about the growing number of people I know which rely on AI tools to diagnose medical ailments, compose legal contracts or, most alarmingly, “fact-check” what they read online.
On the upside, my experience, slight and unscientific as it was, adds weight to a study released last month showing that experienced software programmers – whose jobs seem seriously at risk from AI – took 19 per cent longer to do a set of tasks with AI coding tools than without them.
Things may change. The share of Americans now using AI daily at work is double what it was 12 months ago, even if it is just 8 per cent.
But for the moment, we are stuck with mass AI confusion.
A recent Gallup poll found 49 per cent of Americans think AI is just another tech advance that will improve our lives, and 49 per cent think it is very different and threatens to harm humans and society.
Notably, 64 per cent plan to resist using AI in their own lives for as long as possible. That’s a lot. Tobacco and fossil fuel companies know how hard it is to shift public perceptions once they take hold. But it’s still early days. Back in the year 2000, more than 20 per cent of adult Americans said they would never get a mobile phone, and we all know how that worked out. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
