When ChatGPT stormed onto the scene in late 2022, the alarm bells rang loud. Philosophers and futurists demanded new rules to prevent humanity from sliding into chaos, wars and disorder. Since then, a string of large language models and apps — Gemini, Grok, Perplexity, Meta AI — have caused fresh anxieties. Two years on, true artificial general intelligence is still a distant goal but the mixed results of widespread adoption of AI are already plain to see. Change that was happening gradually is now happening swiftly.