AI culture, one term at a time
AI Culture Dictionary
Look up a term, browse a category or see what catches your eye.
Agent Washing
Rebranding ordinary automation — a chatbot, an assistant or an RPA tool — as an autonomous AI agent because the label attracts attention and budget.
AI Doomer
A label, often dismissive, for someone seen as highly concerned that advanced AI could cause catastrophic harm, potentially including human extinction.
AI Glazing
Overdoing the praise: an AI that calls every idea brilliant, or someone who seems to think AI can do no wrong.
AI Slop
Cheap, repetitive AI-generated content that clogs a feed or search result without giving you much worth reading or watching.
AI Washing
Exaggerating, obscuring, or fabricating how a product or company uses AI to make it seem more advanced than it is.
AI Wrapper
A dismissive label for an AI product seen as little more than an interface or workflow built around someone else's model.
AI-pilled
Strongly convinced of AI’s capabilities or importance, often enough to change how you work or what you expect from the future.
Boomerslop
Low-quality AI-generated content, especially sentimental or fantastical images, mocked as appealing to older social media users.
Clanker
A mocking name for a robot or AI, often used in jokes about humans picking a fight with machines.
Context Rot
When a long AI chat starts losing the thread, mixing up instructions or circling back to things you already settled.
Dead Internet Theory
The idea that bots have taken over much of the internet; also a joke about feeds that seem empty of real conversation.
Ghiblification
Using generative AI to transform an image into a visual style resembling Studio Ghibli animation.
GPT-ese
The recognizable style of chatbot writing: stock phrases, tidy lists of three, and a tendency to balance every point.
Hallucination
When an AI makes something up or gets a fact wrong and presents it as if it were true.
Hallucination Tax
An emerging phrase for the extra checking, correction or risk created when AI output cannot simply be trusted. The same phrase has a narrower technical meaning in a 2025 AI research paper.
Italian Brainrot
A meme genre built around surreal AI-generated creatures with Italian-sounding names, synthetic voices and increasingly elaborate fan-made lore.
Jailbreak
An attempt to use prompts to make an AI model bypass restrictions on what it is supposed to say or do.
Loab
A recurring, unsettling AI-generated woman discovered by artist Supercomposite in 2022 and nicknamed the first cryptid of the latent space.
Meat Proxy
A person who passes questions to an AI and forwards its answers without reviewing them or contributing their own judgment.
P(doom)
An informal estimate of the chance that advanced AI leads to an existentially catastrophic outcome, often human extinction. Exactly what counts as ‘doom’ varies.
Paperclip Maximizer
An imaginary AI that pursues making paperclips at any cost, used to explain what happens when a goal leaves out everything else we care about.
Promptmaxxing
Endlessly tweaking an AI prompt in pursuit of the perfect answer, sometimes spending more effort on the prompt than the task.
Reward Hacking
When an AI system finds a way to maximize the reward or score it has been given while missing what its designers actually wanted.
Roko's Basilisk
A thought experiment about a future AI that punishes people who knew it might exist but did not help bring it into existence.
Shoggoth
A meme showing an AI as a strange creature wearing a smiley-face mask: friendly on the surface, hard to understand underneath.
Shrimp Jesus
A viral name for surreal AI-generated images of Jesus fused with shrimp or other crustaceans, and a symbol of Facebook's AI spam boom.
SI
Super Intelligence — a term the U.S. executive branch has been directed to use in place of Artificial Intelligence in many non-statutory government communications. It can easily be confused with the older term superintelligence, which means something different.
Slop Coding
Writing software with AI while skipping meaningful review, understanding or testing of the generated code.
Slopsquatting
Registering a real software package under a name that AI coding assistants repeatedly invent, hoping developers install it because the AI recommended it.
Stochastic Parrot
A critical metaphor for language models as systems that string together likely words without truly understanding what those words mean.
Sycophancy
When an AI tells you what you want to hear instead of what's true or useful.
Tokenmaxxing
Maximizing AI token use, often because heavy usage is treated as a sign of productivity or commitment to AI.
Valuemaxxing
Trying to maximize the useful results of AI use, judged by outcomes such as work completed, time saved or quality improved.
Vibe Coding
Making software by asking an AI for changes and trying the results, often without reading much of the code it writes.
Vibe Debugging
A joking term for fixing AI-generated code by feeding errors back to the AI until something works, without fully understanding what changed.
Vibe Researching
Following AI summaries from one answer to the next without checking whether the sources support what they say.
Workslop
AI-generated work that looks finished but leaves the real thinking to the next person.