This is the time of the AI tech boom. The AI market is currently $241.8 billion according to Statista .
For scale, that means AI already dwarfs Statista's estimated size for the global movie industry — $79.22 billion — and puts it neck-and-neck with the video game industry at $282.30 billion .
Since the auspicious November 2022 day which saw OpenAI unleash ChatGPT on the masses, AI products have been in the hands of consumers as both tools and toys. These products have sparked an entire era of tech that is even forcing Apple to say "AI," but the speed of this boom was propelled by waves of imperfect tools being honed in the public eye with varying degrees of success. AI critics are rightly hard on the current crop of AI tech for its tendency to hallucinate or otherwise screw up.
Ed Zitron, for instance, has dismissed the AI hype machine as "the theoretical promises of any number of monotonous billionaires that want to turn every website into fuel for a machine that continually gets things wrong." That's more or less fair, and I'm with Zitron that the public should demand more and better from this tech. But something that always bears keeping in mind is that AI's errors and odd responses are super fun, and that under-stated fact has created a giant game environment where everyone with an interest in tech is playing.
Some of this "gaming" is literal, and these games lay out the basic framework of the broader, global game. For instance, I'm addicted to a literal AI game crea.
