On February 16, Vanderbilt University’s office for equity, diversity, and inclusion issued a statement on the shooting that had occurred shortly before at Michigan State University. The statement was boilerplate, suggesting that the university “come together as a community to reaffirm our commitment to caring for one another and promoting a culture of inclusivity on our campus” to “honor the victims of this tragedy.” The only remarkable thing about the message was that a footnote credited ChatGPT with producing its first draft. The office apologized one day later, after an outcry.

This curious incident throws the most recent panic-hype cycle around artificial intelligence into stark relief. ChatGPT, a “large language model” that generates text by predicting the next word in a sequence, was introduced in November 2022, becoming the fastest-ever platform to reach one hundred million users and triggering a new wave of debate about whether machines can achieve “intelligence.” A ChatGPT-supercharged Bing tool was briefly shut down after a New York Times reporter published a transcript in which the bot insisted at length that it loved him, that he did not love his wife, and that it “wanted to be alive.”

These debates, including the exhibitionist scaremongering, are mostly vapor. But the systems themselves should be taken seriously. They may supplant low-level tasks in both writing and coding, and could lead to a mass cognitive deskilling, just as the industrial factory disaggregated and immiserated physical labor. Because these systems can write code, “software” may disappear as a haven for employment, just as journalism has already seen happen, with Buzzfeed committing to using ChatGPT for content creation. Automation is always partial, of course, but reassigning some labor tasks to machines is a constant of capitalism. When those tasks are cognitive ones, the machine threatens to blur the crucial social boundaries between labor and management and labor and “free time,” among others.