An A.I.celandic Christmas

 If you were a passing linguist and wanted snapshot of the mood of the Western world as the year turns fitfully over in its sleep, then the annual Word of the Year from various publications and institutions can be somewhat useful. Recent years certainly tell a particular story, which you'll pardon me for cherry picking as I lead my horse to the crux of the matter. 2023 was a particularly fruitful year, providing us with 'AI' (Collins English Dictionary), 'generative AI' (Macquarie Dictionary), 'ChatGPT' (The Economist), 'hallucination' (Cambridge English Dictionary) and the prosaic 'enshittification' (American Dialect Society). A year later that last word returned for a victory lap (alongside brat, rawdog, brain rot and manifest), while for 2025? 'slop' (Merriam-Webster and The Economist), 'AI slop' (Macquarie) and 'rage bait' (Oxford).

You get the idea.

AI is not everyone's amber-hued, six-fingered cup of tea, but it's here to stay, probably, and may one day prove its cost in a positive way for all humanity. At least for all the... enshittification of the visual and musical arts, we can be grateful that a good use of upscaling brings us a lovely restoration of Bjork dismantling a Sony Trinitron TV. You can stop it at the 3:34 mark if you like, but stay up 'til then at least for a Christmas-adjacent exploration of miniature transistor cities, even smaller screens, all sorts of 'situations' and Danish TV manuals. It's charming and brilliant, and reminds me of why my friends and I fell in love with the singer from the Sugarcubes over 35 years ago:

I might return to Bjork some other time, but in the meanwhile, let's give her the floor a little longer with the tale of the Icelandic Yule Cat, all the way back in the year of my friends' and my first contact:

Jólaköttur the Yule Cat is a giant beastie who eats those who do not receive new clothes for Christmas - so for their sake, be generous to those in need this winter. There are some things that AI slop really won't fix, and this is one.

So merry Yuletide, one and all. Dress warm if you can (unless it's midsummer, obv), stay safe, and don't listen to poets.