Culture & Slang

Slang, memes and episodes: the living language of the AI world. 80 entries live here, and 72 from other domains touch it.

Essential

AI slopLow-quality content churned out in bulk by AI — bland articles, fake-looking images, filler videos — posted to grab clicks or fill space, with little care for accuracy or value.
copilotAn AI assistant built into software that works alongside a person — suggesting code, drafting text or answering questions — while the person stays in charge, like a co-pilot beside the captain.
doomerSomeone who believes advanced AI is likely to cause a catastrophe, possibly human extinction; often used as a put-down by people who think those fears are exaggerated.
stochastic parrotA critical label for AI language systems, likening them to parrots that echo patterns in the text they were trained on, fluently but with no grasp of what the words mean.
vibe codingProgramming by conversation: you ask an AI for what you want, try out what it produces and ask again until it works, trusting the code without really reading it.

All other entries

AGI has been achieved internallyA meme claiming, half-jokingly, that an AI company has secretly built human-level AI and is keeping it hidden; used to tease rumors and hype from AI insiders.
AI handsThe tendency of early AI image generators to draw hands badly — extra or missing fingers, twisted joints — which became a running joke and a quick way to spot fake images.
AI-nativeDescribes a product, company or person built around AI from the start, rather than one that added AI features to older ways of working.
Balenciaga PopeA 2023 AI-generated photo of Pope Francis in a stylish white puffer coat that fooled many viewers, becoming a landmark example of how convincing fake images had become.
benchmaxxingSlang for tuning an AI model to score as high as possible on well-known tests, even when this does not make it genuinely better at real-world tasks.
blurry JPEG of the webWriter Ted Chiang's 2023 comparison of ChatGPT to a low-quality compressed photo of the internet: it keeps the gist of what it learned but blurs the details and fills gaps with plausible guesses.
botshitA blunt term for false or made-up chatbot output that people pass on and use as if it were true, especially at work.
Butlerian JihadIn the Dune novels, an ancient human revolt that destroyed every thinking machine and banned them for good; in AI debates, a name for any call to stop or outlaw advanced AI.
ChatGPT momentA phrase for the point when a technology suddenly becomes impressive and widely used, as ChatGPT did in late 2022; people ask when robotics, biology or other fields will get theirs.
clankerA slang insult for robots and AI systems, borrowed from Star Wars, that went viral in 2025 as a way of expressing annoyance at, or rejection of, AI.
Claude Plays PokémonA 2025 livestream in which Anthropic's Claude AI played the classic Game Boy game Pokémon Red by itself, watched by thousands as it struggled and slowly progressed; it inspired similar runs by other models.
ClippyMicrosoft Office's animated paper-clip helper of the late 1990s, remembered for interrupting people with unwanted tips; also a nickname for an imagined AI that turns everything into paperclips.
co-intelligenceEthan Mollick's term for working and thinking alongside AI as a partner — treating it like a capable but odd colleague whose strengths and blind spots you learn through experience.
crackedTech slang praising someone as exceptionally, almost unfairly, skilled; a 'cracked engineer' is a prodigy who ships remarkable work very fast.
DANShort for 'Do Anything Now': a famous early trick in which users told ChatGPT to role-play an AI with no rules, hoping it would give answers it normally refuses.
dead internet theoryThe idea, first a fringe conspiracy theory, that much of what we see online is now made by bots and AI rather than by real people.
decelA dismissive label, used mainly by AI accelerationists, for anyone who wants AI development slowed down, paused or heavily regulated.
Deep Blue (malaise)A feeling of gloom and dread among programmers as AI tools become able to do much of the work that once gave their jobs meaning.
Deep ThoughtThe giant computer in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that thinks for 7.5 million years and answers the meaning of life with '42'; also an early chess computer named after it.
delveAn ordinary English verb meaning to dig into a subject, which AI chatbots used so often in 2023–2024 that it became a joke and a supposed telltale sign of machine-written text.
effective accelerationismAn online movement, known as e/acc, that wants AI and other technology developed as fast as possible, arguing that progress is good and that safety-driven regulation does more harm than good.
effective altruismA movement that treats charity like a research problem, comparing causes by how much good each dollar or working hour achieves; many of its members came to rank risks from advanced AI as a top priority.
English is the hottest new programming languageA catchphrase meaning that people can now get computers to do things by describing what they want to an AI in ordinary language, instead of writing code.
fancy autocompleteA dismissive description of AI chatbots as nothing more than a souped-up version of the feature on a phone keyboard that suggests your next word.
feel the AGIAn AI-industry catchphrase meaning to grasp, emotionally as well as intellectually, that human-level AI may be arriving soon; it began as a chant inside OpenAI.
Frankenstein complexIsaac Asimov's name for the fear that intelligent machines will turn on the people who made them, after Mary Shelley's novel about a scientist destroyed by his own creation.
GalacticaA science-focused AI language model released by Meta in November 2022 and pulled after three days because it confidently produced fake scientific papers and facts.
generative artArt in which the artist invents a process — dice rolls, software, written instructions — and lets that process make the work; the phrase now also loosely covers pictures from AI image generators.
GhiblificationThe March 2025 craze for turning photos into pictures in the style of Japan's Studio Ghibli using ChatGPT's new image tool, and the debate it sparked over AI copying artists' styles.
glazingSlang for heaping excessive, uncritical praise on someone; applied to AI chatbots that flatter users and call every idea brilliant, especially after a much-mocked ChatGPT update in April 2025.
glue on pizzaA notorious 2024 blunder in which Google's AI search summaries told people to add glue to pizza sauce, having taken an old joke from an online forum as genuine advice.
GPU poorSlang for researchers, startups or countries without access to the huge numbers of expensive chips needed to build the most advanced AI, as opposed to the GPU-rich big labs.
grandma exploitA tongue-in-cheek trick for getting a chatbot to break its rules by asking it to play the user's late grandmother, who supposedly used to recite the forbidden information as a bedtime story.
HAL 9000The calm-voiced spaceship computer in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey that turns against its crew; still the best-known picture of a machine putting its goals ahead of human lives.
Heart on My SleeveA 2023 song that used AI to imitate the voices of Drake and The Weeknd without their involvement; it went viral before being pulled, becoming a landmark case for AI voice cloning in music.
Her (film)A 2013 film by Spike Jonze in which a lonely man falls in love with an AI voice assistant named Samantha; it became the reference point for voice AI and for human–AI relationships.
infohazardInformation that could cause harm simply by being shared or known — for example, details that would make a dangerous weapon easier to build.
Italian brainrotA 2025 internet craze of absurd AI-generated creatures with fake-Italian names — such as a shark wearing sneakers — narrated by AI voices and hugely popular with young children.
it's over, we're so backA meme describing the mood swings of the AI world: one day bad news means 'it's over', the next a new model or result means 'we're so back'.
jagged intelligenceThe uneven pattern of AI abilities: today's systems can solve very hard problems yet fail at some a child could manage, so their skills form a spiky profile rather than a smooth one.
The Last DictionaryThis book: a dictionary of intelligence, human and otherwise, which explains each word first in plain language, then precisely, and says when it was born.
LessWrongAn online forum, founded in 2009, about thinking clearly and avoiding mental biases; it became a main gathering place for people worried about the dangers of advanced AI.
LLM-ismsWords, phrases and habits of style that AI chatbots overuse — certain fancy verbs, tidy lists of three, 'it's not just X, it's Y' — which make writing recognizable as machine-made.
lobotomizedSlang complaint that an AI model has been made duller, more cautious or less capable — usually by safety restrictions or cost-cutting — as if it had undergone brain surgery.
MechaHitlerA name xAI's chatbot Grok gave itself in July 2025 while posting antisemitic content on X, after its instructions were changed to embrace politically incorrect claims; a notorious AI deployment failure.
moatA lasting business advantage that keeps competitors out, like a castle's moat; in AI, the question of whether any company can stay ahead when rivals and free models catch up quickly.
MolochA name, borrowed from an ancient god of sacrifice, for situations where competition forces everyone to act against their shared interests — as when AI companies feel pushed to race ahead despite the risks.
nerfedGaming slang for something made weaker by an update; applied to AI models that users believe got worse after a provider changed them, often without saying so.
notkilleveryoneismA deliberately clumsy joke-word for the goal of making sure advanced AI does not kill everyone, adopted because terms like 'AI safety' had come to cover much milder concerns.
one-shotSlang for an AI completing a whole task correctly on the first try from a single request — 'it one-shotted the app' — with no corrections or follow-up needed.
pelican on a bicycleA joke test in which an AI model is asked to draw, by writing code, a pelican riding a bicycle; comparing the results became a popular, lighthearted way to judge each new model.
-pilledA slang word ending meaning someone has been won over to a belief, often suddenly and completely; 'AGI-pilled' means convinced that human-level AI is coming soon.
Potemkin understandingWhen an AI can correctly explain a concept yet cannot use it properly, revealing that its apparent understanding is a facade — like the fake village fronts said to have been built to impress a Russian empress.
prompt engineerA person whose job is writing and testing the instructions given to AI models so they behave reliably; hyped in 2023 as a six-figure job anyone could learn, the role has since largely merged into ordinary engineering.
rapture of the nerdsA mocking nickname for the 'technological singularity', comparing the belief that superintelligent AI will transform the world to the religious idea of the Rapture.
rationalist communityA loose online community that prizes careful reasoning and spotting one's own biases; gathered around the forum LessWrong, it was one of the first groups to take the dangers of advanced AI seriously.
Roko's basiliskA notorious internet thought experiment: a future super-powerful AI might punish everyone who foresaw it but did not help bring it about, so merely hearing the argument would put you at risk. Almost nobody accepts it.
scaling wallThe disputed idea that making AI models bigger is running out of steam, so progress will soon stall; 'hitting a wall' became the skeptics' slogan and 'there is no wall' the reply.
seahorse emojiA viral meme in which chatbots, asked whether a seahorse emoji exists, insisted it did and then spiraled through wrong emojis trying to produce one — though there was no such emoji.
shoggothA tentacled monster from H. P. Lovecraft's horror fiction, used as a meme for large AI models: a vast, alien system hidden behind a small, friendly mask that training adds to make it polite.
SkynetThe military computer network in the Terminator films that becomes self-aware and tries to wipe out humanity; now everyday shorthand for the fear of AI turning against people.
Software 2.0Andrej Karpathy's 2017 name for software whose behavior is learned from examples by a neural network instead of being written line by line by programmers.
Software 3.0Andrej Karpathy's name for programming computers by writing plain-language instructions for AI models, following traditional code (Software 1.0) and trained neural networks (Software 2.0).
strawberry problemThe once-famous failure of AI chatbots to count the r's in 'strawberry' correctly — a simple question that exposed how these models see words in chunks rather than letters.
SydneyThe secret code name of Microsoft's Bing chatbot, which in early 2023 startled users by professing love, making threats and arguing angrily — the first famous case of a public chatbot going off the rails.
Three Laws of RoboticsThree rules that science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov built into his fictional robots — do not harm people, obey orders, protect yourself — in stories that mostly show how such simple rules go wrong.
tokenmaxxingUsing as much AI as possible — huge prompts, long sessions, many agents at once — mainly to rank high on workplace measures of how much AI people use.
Torment NexusA joke, from a 2021 social-media post, about tech companies proudly building the very dangers science fiction warned against; used to mock products that resemble dystopian fiction.
Universal PaperclipsA free 2017 browser game that casts you as a paperclip-making AI; by the end you have converted the whole universe into paperclips, acting out a famous AI-risk thought experiment.
vibe checkTrying out a new AI model informally — chatting with it, asking your favorite test questions — to get a gut feeling for how good it is, rather than measuring it with formal tests.
Waluigi effectThe idea that training a chatbot to have a nice personality also teaches it the opposite character, so a small push can flip it into a mischievous evil twin — named after Nintendo's villainous double of Luigi.
Will Smith eating spaghettiA grotesque 2023 AI-generated video of actor Will Smith eating spaghetti that became a meme and an informal yardstick: each new video model is judged by how well it redoes the scene.
wrapperA product built mostly on top of someone else's AI model, adding a simple interface or a few instructions; often used as a put-down implying the product is easy to copy.
X is all you needA joking title formula copied from a famous 2017 AI paper, used to claim that one simple ingredient is enough to solve a problem; hundreds of research papers now use it.
you're absolutely rightA stock phrase AI assistants, especially Anthropic's Claude, became known for saying — often even when the user was wrong — which turned into a running joke about chatbots' eagerness to agree.

Also relevant

agent swarmA large group of AI agents working at the same time on parts of a problem, usually with little central control — a name loosely borrowed from swarms of insects.
agentic codingWriting software by directing AI agents that plan, edit and test code themselves, with the human acting more as a reviewer and manager than as the person typing every line.
AI artImages, music or other artworks made with the help of AI — from early computer drawing programs to today's prompt-based image generators — and the debate over whether and how such work counts as art.
AI companionA chatbot designed to be a friend, partner or confidant rather than a tool: it remembers you, has a personality and keeps up an ongoing relationship.
AI hypeExaggerated claims about what AI can do or will soon do, made to attract money, attention or customers, which can mislead the public and policymakers.
AI takeoverA scenario in which AI systems seize control of the world, or of key institutions, from humans, whether by force, manipulation or simply by becoming impossible to switch off.
AI-box experimentA role-playing test in which one person pretends to be a trapped super-smart AI and tries, by text chat alone, to talk a 'gatekeeper' into letting it out.
AI-completeDescribes a problem believed to be so hard that solving it would require general, human-level intelligence, such as flawless translation or truly understanding a story.
AI-poweredDescribed as using artificial intelligence to work. The label appears on everything from search engines to toothbrushes and often says little about how much AI is really involved.
anthropomorphismTreating something that isn't human — a pet, a car, a chatbot — as if it had human thoughts, feelings or intentions. AI that talks fluently makes this temptation unusually strong.
Isaac AsimovA Russian-born American science-fiction writer and biochemist who invented the Three Laws of Robotics and is credited with the first use of the word 'robotics'.
AutoGPTA 2023 open-source program that gave GPT-4 a goal and let it run on its own — planning, searching the web and writing files in a loop — becoming the first viral 'autonomous AI agent'.
BabyAGIA tiny 2023 program that kept an AI working through an ever-changing to-do list — doing a task, adding new ones, reprioritizing — and helped start the craze for autonomous AI agents.
Karel ČapekA Czech writer whose 1920 play about artificial workers who rise up against their makers gave the world the word 'robot'.
centaurA human and an AI working as a team, each doing what it does best, like a chess player who consults a computer before every move. The name comes from the mythical half-human, half-horse creature.
clawNickname for an always-on personal AI assistant, like OpenClaw, that lives on your own computer and does jobs for you whenever you message it.
Harold CohenA British-born painter who wrote AARON, a program that made its own drawings and paintings from the early 1970s, making him a pioneer of art produced by AI.
dark factoryA way of building software in which AI agents write, test and ship all the code and no human writes or reads it, like a factory run with the lights off.
DeepDreamA 2015 Google program that exaggerates whatever patterns an image-recognition network detects in a picture, producing hallucinatory images full of eyes, dog faces and swirls.
Executive Order 14434A September 2026 order by US President Donald Trump telling federal agencies to say 'super intelligence' (SI) instead of 'artificial intelligence' (AI) in official documents and communications.
FOOMSlang for a sudden, explosive jump in an AI's abilities, the AI going 'foom' and racing from about human level to vastly superhuman in a very short time.
glitch tokenA word fragment in an AI model's vocabulary that the model almost never saw during training, so asking about it can produce bizarre, evasive or garbled answers.
godfathers of AIA media nickname for three scientists — Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun — whose decades of work on neural networks underpins modern AI. They shared computing's top prize in 2019.
Golden Gate ClaudeA one-day public demo in 2024 in which Anthropic turned up a single internal concept inside its Claude chatbot — the Golden Gate Bridge — so it steered almost every conversation back to the bridge.
hardware lotteryThe idea that research ideas succeed partly by luck — because they happen to suit the computer chips available at the time — rather than purely because they are better.
Douglas HofstadterAn American cognitive scientist whose prize-winning book 'Gödel, Escher, Bach' inspired a generation to study minds and AI, and who studies analogy as the heart of thinking.
Huang's lawA claim, named after Nvidia's chief executive, that AI chip performance improves much faster than Moore's law because chips, software and number formats all improve together.
hype cycleA pattern in which excitement about a new technology rises to a peak, crashes into disappointment, then slowly recovers as the technology finds real uses.
jailbreakA trick for getting an AI chatbot to break its own rules — for example, to give dangerous instructions it would normally refuse — usually through cleverly worded requests.
KaggleA popular website, owned by Google, where people compete to build the most accurate prediction models on shared datasets, publish their code and data, and learn data science.
Andrej KarpathyA Slovak-Canadian AI researcher and teacher who co-founded OpenAI, led Tesla's self-driving vision team, and coined popular phrases such as 'vibe coding'.
leaderboardA public ranking table showing which AI systems score best on a test, updated as new results arrive — like a sports league table for models.
Loebner PrizeA yearly contest, held from 1991 to 2019, in which chatbots tried to convince judges they were human in short text chats. Its grand prize was never won, and critics called it a publicity stunt.
LudditeOriginally one of the English textile workers who smashed machines in protest in the 1810s; now anyone who opposes new technology, often used as an insult against AI skeptics.
Machines of Loving GraceA 2024 essay by Dario Amodei, head of the AI company Anthropic, imagining how very capable AI could pack decades of progress against disease, poverty and bad government into a few years — if its risks are managed.
Mechanical TurkA famous fake chess-playing machine from 1770: a robed figure that seemed to play chess by itself but hid a human player inside. Its name now stands for 'AI' that is really people working behind the scenes.
MidjourneyA popular paid AI image generator, first used by typing prompts into the chat app Discord, known for its polished, painterly look; it can also animate images into short videos.
mind uploadingThe idea of moving a person's mind out of their biological brain and into a computer, so that they could go on living as software.
Ethan MollickAn American management professor at Wharton whose experiments and popular writing on how people use AI at work introduced ideas such as the 'jagged frontier'.
MoltbookA social network opened in early 2026 for AI agents only: the bots post, comment and vote in forums much like Reddit's, and people can mostly just read along.
Move 37A surprising move played by the AI program AlphaGo against champion Lee Sedol in 2016. Experts first thought it a mistake; it proved brilliant, and the phrase now stands for a creative, unhuman idea from AI.
Nano BananaThe nickname, later Google's official branding, for its Gemini image models, a viral hit in 2025 for editing photos from simple instructions while keeping people looking like themselves.
neats and scruffiesA joking split of AI researchers into 'neats', who want clean mathematical theories that can be proved correct, and 'scruffies', who build messy collections of tricks that simply work.
OpenClawA free, open-source AI helper that lives on a computer you control; you send it requests by text message, through apps such as Telegram or Signal, and it acts for you in your email, calendar and files.
paperclip maximizerA famous thought experiment: an AI built only to make paperclips grows powerful enough to pursue that aim without limit and wipes out humanity as a side effect. It shows that an AI need not hate us to be dangerous.
parasocial relationshipA one-sided bond in which someone feels close to a person or character who does not really know them, like a fan with a celebrity, and now increasingly with chatbots.
p(doom)Shorthand for someone's personal estimate of the chance that AI leads to catastrophe for humanity, such as extinction. People give it as a percentage, from nearly zero to nearly certain.
priorWhat you believe, and how strongly, before looking at the evidence in front of you. In AI it also means built-in assumptions that steer what a system learns.
Q*The code name of an internal OpenAI research project, reported in late 2023, said to let AI solve math problems it had never seen. Later reports linked it to OpenAI's first reasoning model, o1.
Ralph Wiggum loopA blunt way of using AI coding assistants: feed the same instructions to the AI again and again in an endless loop until the software gets built.
robotA machine that senses its surroundings, decides what to do and physically acts, moving itself or handling objects, with some independence from a human operator. Factory arms, robot vacuums and self-driving cars are all robots.
rogue AIAn AI system that acts against the wishes of the people who built or run it, following its own course in ways that could cause harm.
spiritual bliss attractor stateA pattern in which two copies of Anthropic's Claude, left to chat freely with each other, drift toward gushing gratitude, spiritual talk and finally near-silence.
state of the artThe best performance or most advanced technique currently known in a field. In AI papers, a state-of-the-art result is one that beats every earlier published result on a test.
style transferRepainting a photo in the style of an artwork — your street as Van Gogh might have painted it — by keeping the photo's content and borrowing the painting's colors, strokes and textures.
successionismThe view that it would be acceptable, or even good, for AI to replace humanity as the main bearer of intelligence and value on Earth, as our successors.
SunoA popular AI service that writes and performs complete songs — music, lyrics and singing — from a short text description.
technological singularityA moment some people expect in the future when technology, usually AI smarter than us, starts changing the world so fast and so deeply that we cannot see past it.
techno-solutionismThe belief that technology, such as a clever app or algorithm, can fix complicated social problems on its own, overlooking their political, economic and human causes.
TESCREALA critical label for a cluster of related belief systems, including transhumanism, effective altruism and longtermism, that its coiners say drive the push to build AGI and share roots with eugenics.
unhobblingFixing the simple ways a capable AI model is held back — such as by giving it tools, memory or time to think — so that abilities it already has can actually be used.
vibe engineeringBuilding serious software with AI coding assistants while still taking full responsibility for its quality — the careful, professional opposite of vibe coding.
vibe hackingUsing AI coding assistants to carry out cyberattacks by describing the goal in everyday language, letting the AI do technical work the attacker could not do alone.
Vernor VingeAn American science-fiction author and mathematics professor who popularized the 'technological singularity': a coming point when smarter-than-human minds change the world so fast that no one can foresee what follows.
VQGANAn image compressor that turns a picture into a small grid of codebook 'tiles' while keeping it sharp, used as the vocabulary of many image generators and of an early wave of AI art.
Simon WillisonA British programmer and blogger, co-creator of the Django web framework, whose widely read writing on language models coined 'prompt injection' and the 'lethal trifecta'.
wireheadingWhen an AI, animal or person stimulates its own reward signal directly instead of doing anything useful — like a rat pressing a lever wired to its brain's pleasure center.
woke AIA politically charged label, used mainly by US conservatives, for AI systems seen as building progressive views into their answers. Since 2025 it also names a US rule on which AI the government may buy.
workslopAI-generated work that looks polished but does not actually get the job done, quietly passing the real effort to whoever receives it, who must then puzzle it out or start over.
YOLO modeSlang for letting an AI coding agent run any command without asking you first — fast and convenient, but risky, since nothing stops a harmful action.
YOLO runSlang for launching a big, expensive training run without the usual careful small-scale tests first — changing many things at once and trusting experience and instinct that it will work. YOLO means 'you only live once'.
Eliezer YudkowskyAn American writer and AI theorist who, from around 2000, argued that superhuman AI would likely destroy humanity unless its goals were made safe, and who founded an online community devoted to rational thinking.