It’s easy to be convinced that the myriad applications of AI pave a fun but nonetheless alarming digital path towards doom, doom, doom.

Let’s start with “slop”. It’s the term now in use for AI-created graphic content pushed out on social media to attract eyeballs – and, in doing so, channel engagement – using spectacular, surreal images, the kind that can digitally mash Jesus with prawns in photographic detail. My Facebook feed heaves with ads for 80s trash sci-fi, shiny polyester shapewear and cream for smokers’ wrinkles; I suspect clicking “stills” of Star Wars Episode 1 in a Ken Loach universe may be to blame.

Those not entranced by the bizarre can be dangerously tempted by beauty, in the proliferation of anonymous social media accounts posting AI-enhanced images celebrating (exclusively, conspicuously) western architecture and art. Historians and extremism researchers have identified in them an “antiquity to alt-right” propaganda pipeline where white European accomplishments are slyly promoted as superior. Those dreamy libraries and Roman pillars are pretty but they’re also bait to lure users towards coded, faux-intellectual shibboleths of white supremacy.

My personal anxieties about the barely guardrailed........

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