I’ve been watching an interesting phenomenon unfold online lately, and it’s left me equal parts amused and frustrated. There’s this persistent belief floating around anti-AI circles that if the big tech companies collapse or stop developing AI models, then somehow all AI capabilities will just… vanish. Like it’s some kind of cloud-based subscription service that gets shut off when the bills aren’t paid.

It’s a genuinely baffling misunderstanding of how technology actually works.

I stumbled across an interesting discussion online the other day that made me pause mid-sip of my latte. Someone was asking whether they could join in on the workplace banter about attractive celebrities, seeing as their female colleagues were openly discussing Jason Momoa in the team chat. The twist? They wanted to share their own list, which included… well, let’s just say it escalated from Margaret Qualley to some rather specific fantasies involving WWE wrestlers and, bizarrely, Pauline Hanson.

There’s a statistic doing the rounds that’s been gnawing at me for days now: nearly half of all full-time workers in Australia earn over $100,000 a year. When I first read that, my initial reaction was disbelief. Then I remembered what my salary was a decade ago, what it is now, and how much less I seem to have in my pocket at the end of each month despite earning considerably more on paper.