Is the vibe now shifting around AI?

People are coming to accept that this Singularity thing is really happening

Across all 30 countries, the [Ipsos Mori] polling showed very few people want AI created-online news articles, films or adverts, but most people think it is likely AI will become the primary producer of all of these things as well as making television programmes, screening job adverts and even creating realistic sports content such as tennis matches between AI-generated players.
The Guardian, 5/6/25

While all AI companies are free to select any operating ideology, the federal government will purchase only software that is “truth-seeking” and committed to “ideological neutrality.” In other words, Washington will not do business with companies whose models will result in “the suppression or distortion of factual information about race or sex; manipulation of racial or sexual representation in model outputs; incorporation of concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism; and discrimination on the basis of race or sex.” The theory behind the executive order is that Washington has an enormous influence over technology companies via contracting.
Christopher Rufo, 28/7/25

AI Is Wrecking an Already Fragile Job Market for College Graduates
WSJ headline, 29/7/25

The promise of AI lies in automating swathes of labour-intensive preparation and research work, freeing up lawyers to focus on higher-value tasks… Firms see a path to turning 100 hours of junior time into 10 hours of AI time plus partner review… But as with every other industry exploring AI-driven automation, the legal sector faces deeper questions about its future. The types of routine research and preparation tasks which could soon be handled by AI have long been the domain of junior lawyers — the training ground before they progress to more complex tasks and responsibilities… It could be even more existential than that. As Australia’s chief justice Stephen Gageler told Capital Brief…“If you're a plaintiff and you have an AI system formulating your arguments, and there's a defendant who has an AI system formulating the defendant's arguments, is a judge going to have another AI system judging between these two computer-generated arguments?”
Capital Brief, 29/7/25

Tech billionaire Scott Farquhar has defended widespread adoption of artificial intelligence, saying it presents an opportunity for Australia to make “megabucks” through data centres, after the tech giant he co-founded slashed 150 jobs in customer services roles exposed to the new technology.

Farquhar, who is chair of the Tech Council of Australia and co-founded the $80 billion company Atlassian, spoke to the National Press Club on Wednesday to argue the country should reform copyright law to let AI companies mine data more freely as part of a productivity blueprint.
Millie Muroi, Shane Wright, David Swan, SMH, 30/7/25

We have begun to see glimpses of our AI systems improving themselves. The improvement is slow for now, but undeniable. Developing superintelligence is now in sight.
Mark Zuckerberg, 30/7/25

Nick Cave injected himself into the AI debate soon after the first iteration of ChatGPT dropped in late 2022. Writing for his Red Hand Files blog in early 2023, he revealed people had been sending him AI-generated “songs in the style of Nick Cave” and that he wasn’t impressed because AI “cannot create a genuine song”.

Sure, AI might be able to generate a simulacrum of a song, but it could never be a genuine, or genuinely affecting, song because

Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend.

By March of 2025, Cave’s contempt for AI had evolved somewhat. In reference to the AI song generator Suno, he told The Australian

I went on the app, and wrote, ‘Dark, slow, gothic song about a banana,’ right?” he said. “And within 15 seconds, it spat this song out, called The Dying Peel. It was good; it had a good chorus. It wasn’t great. It even understood that there’s a sort of joke going on about the dark gothic song on the banana — that you were taking the piss a little bit — so it talks in all these extended metaphors about the blackening of the skin, and all this sort of stuff… But the thing is that it’s good; it’s kind of bland, but you can see the direction of it.

In his most recent post for Red Hand Files, Cave responds to an Alaskan fan who asks, “Is changing your mind about things a sign of weakness?” by sharing an anecdote about his mate, expat Aussie filmmaker Andrew Dominik, putting together an AI-generated ‘music video’ for Tupelo, one of Cave’s most epic, cinematic and beloved songs.

“I’ve taken a series of still archival images and brought them to life using AI,” Dominik tells a sceptical Cave. “Jesus, suspend your fucking prejudices and take a look!”

Cave watches the clip and to his surprise, finds it to be

A soulful, moving, and entirely original retelling of ‘Tupelo’, rich in mythos and a touching tribute to the great Elvis Presley, as well as to the song itself. The AI-animated photographs of Elvis had an uncanny quality, as if he had been raised from the dead, and the crucifixion-resurrection images at the end were both shocking and deeply affecting. Susie [Cave’s wife] and I were blown away. As I watched Andrew’s surreal little film, I felt my view of AI as an artistic device soften. To some extent, my mind was changed.

AI acceptance
It strikes me that Cave has embarked on a familiar journey. One that people often go through when facing the loss of something they know and love. After a spell working with terminally ill patients in the mid-1960s, a Swiss-American psychiatrist called Elisabeth Kübler-Ross identified the five stages of that journey:

Denial: AI isn’t a threat to my livelihood and, indeed, entire way of life

Anger: AI is a threat to my livelihood and way of life, and that’s a cosmic injustice

Bargaining: Maybe I can devise a cunning plan to preserve my livelihood and way of life despite the unwelcome arrival of AI?

Depression: AI is going to affect my livelihood and lifestyle profoundly and there’s very little I can do about it

Acceptance: Like other technologies – the steam engine, electricity, the internal combustion engine, the internet, the smart phone – AI is going to unleash world-shaking transformations. I may as well lie back and think of England.

Real life rarely follows such tidy arcs. Individuals don’t necessarily move neatly from one stage to the next. It’s common to feel a mix of some or all of the five emotions at once. But all going well, you ultimately achieve the serenity required to “accept the things I cannot change”.

To be clear, Cave hasn’t become an AI aficionado. Before lavishing praise on Dominik’s music video, he reminds readers

I have serious reservations about AI, particularly regarding writers using ChatGPT and other language models to do their creative work. I also have concerns about song-generating platforms that reduce music to a mere commodity, by eliminating the artistic process and its attendant struggles entirely.

Nonetheless, Cave concludes his latest post with the following paragraph

We pursue the truth wherever it may lead, remaining flexible and humble enough to adjust our views as new evidence emerges, regardless of how uncomfortable that may feel. It is ultimately a form of resilience, not a sign of weakness. Rigidity breaks; flexibility endures.

We’re all Nick Cave now
I came to the same conclusion Cave has now apparently reached during the Christmas holidays. Around then, I had to churn out a 60,000-word-plus biography in three months. I enthusiastically leveraged AI tools such as Otter and ChatGPT Pro to speed up the interview transcription, research and – to a lesser extent – writing process.

After I finished the manuscript, what stayed with me wasn’t the usefulness of the AI tools, though they did save me a considerable amount of time and effort. What lingered uneasily on my mind was just how intelligent Artificial Intelligence had become. ChatGPT Pro didn’t write the book for me, much as I occasionally wished it could. But I had the discombobulating realisation that it wasn’t far off being able to write the book for me. It was certainly at the stage of providing improbably detailed and insightful critiques of my copy.

I imagine my unnerving book-writing experience was similar to the one acclaimed scriptwriter Paul Schrader had when he started playing around with ChatGPT. In a Variety article, published earlier this year, Schrader shares his experience of asking AI to come up with film ideas in the style of various auteurs.

“Every idea chatgpt came up with (in a few seconds) was good,” Schrader marvels. “And original. And fleshed out. Why should writers sit around for months searching for a good idea when AI can provide one in seconds?”

Schrader asks AI how to improve one of his (unmade) scripts. “In five seconds it responded with notes as good or better than I’ve ever received from a film executive.”

As a successful Hollywood scriptwriter, Schrader is assuredly not lacking in ego. Nonetheless, incidents such as the ones related above cause him “to realise that AI is smarter than I am. It has better ideas and more efficient ways to execute them. This is an existential moment, akin to what Kasparov felt in 1997 when he realized Deep Blue was going to beat him at chess.”

That sounds like the “existential moment” I had while beavering away on that biography half a year ago. An existential moment that set off a disorienting denial-anger-bargaining-depression response that I’m still working my way through.

Rigidity breaks; flexibility endures
These things are impossible to quantify, but I get the sense there has been a vibe shift around AI in recent weeks. Not in the sense that people are blasé about its actual or potential downsides. Like Cave, many of us remain deeply concerned about its likely future impacts.*

Nonetheless, a critical mass of people now seem to be coming to terms with the idea that (like death) a hugely disorientating AI tsunami will inevitably arrive. Pretending that a tsunami doesn’t exist, or getting angry or sad about it existing, or trying to bargain it out of existence, are entirely human but entirely ineffective responses.

If you’re still stuck in the denial, anger, bargaining or depression stages, please be aware that things are likely to move quickly from here. The sooner you can accept the world as it now is, rather than how you’d prefer it to be, the sooner you can develop a plan for surfing the looming wave, or building something strong enough to withstand it.

*Cave is primarily concerned with the “demoralising” effect AI will have on humans, especially the creative ones. I’m more worried about it ushering in a technofeudalism that will make the devil-takes-the-hindmost neoliberalism of the last four-and-a-bit decades look like a lost Scandinavian idyll.