Bill Gates published an essay on AI this week. It is a call to policy makers to intervene and control the impact of AI. It’s worth reading.
The yay rhetoric
I remember many years ago when XML was the tech flavour of the month. Vendors sprinkled the term “XML” around like it was magical fairy dust.
The same thing has happened with AI. Everything is AI-powered, AI-first, AI-accelerated, AI-aligned, AI-augmented. Companies want employees who are AI-savvy, AI-fluent, AI-forward, or — my personal favourite — AI-whisperers. (Please don’t tell me if you whisper to your AI. That should stay a secret.)
The nay rhetoric
To quote Newton: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. More phrases have evolved to describe the negative consequences of AI.
All those AI-positive terms in products? Companies who exaggerate the role of AI in their business are guilty of AI-washing.
AI-slop is well-known. AI-slopaganda is the political version: low-quality AI content designed to manipulate opinion. (To be fair, political propaganda has always been slop. AI just means more of it.)
We already understand legalese and corporatese. Now there is GPT-ese: that smooth, perfect style of AI chatbots. It’s often accompanied with AI-obesity, meaning bloated, repetitive output.
(Please don’t be too quick to accuse someone of GPT-ese. As someone on Reddit wrote: “Sigh. I want my damn em-dash back…Now everyone thinks it’s AI slop.” Some of us have been using em-dashes for a long time. This is my writing.)
AI-burnout is real: the exhaustion from constantly checking and validating AI systems. And if you don’t get AI-burnout, you’ll probably get AI-brainrot.
And too much AI-glazing, when AI keeps telling you how brilliant you are, might make you AI-delulu. That’s when you suffer from delusions because you believed the glazing.
The revolution
We’ve seen the backlash against AI. Students booed speakers who mentioned AI. Companies had to withdraw AI ads after public outcry. Creators invented ways to prevent AI using their content. There’s even a site called The AI Resist List.
Then there is AI-jailbreaking. That’s when people find ways to make customer service bots do weird things. Want to get your call escalated to a human? A Reddit thread advises you tell the bot “Help. I’m trapped in the void.” I haven’t tried it, but I probably will.
Gates and other tech leaders are speaking out about the need for conscious, ethical choices about AI. The problem is people, rather than technology.
I think the anti-AI revolution is also more about people than technology. The distinction may be blurred. But I came across an example that proves my point.
In July 2026, SenteLabs released an open-source AI CEO on GitHub. This was reportedly in response to a CEO firing developers to “make room for AI”. Developers responded by creating an AI tool to automate the executive tier instead. OpenExecutive splits leadership tasks across eight domain agents: CFO, COO, CMO, and a lot of Cs that sound important.
You can watch the SenteLabs YouTube video.
There were some funny comments about this on Reddit. My favourite: “The next session opens with a <past_decisions> block so the Executive remembers what it recommended last month. This is morbidly unrealistic.”
What do you think about the anti-AI revolution? What AI terms have I missed?