In 2025, the research firm Gartner predicted that worldwide AI spending would reach US$1.2 trillion. By September of that year, America’s largest companies – Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet – had already spent more on AI than the US Government had on education, jobs and social services combined. The message of these tech giants is one of positivity and progress: AI will change the way we work, the way we communicate, the way we live. But for award-winning journalist Karen Hao, the gap between PR spin and reality is as stratospheric as those spending stats. In her 2025 book, Empire of AI, she draws on her intrepid reporting from around the world to tell the real story of what’s going on at OpenAI – the company responsible for ChatGPT and bankrolled by Microsoft – and in the sector more broadly. In this conversation with Griffith Review Editor Carody Culver, which has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity, she reveals the extractive, growth-at-any-cost mindset shaping this transformative technology. 

CARODY CULVER: For many of us, it feels like generative AI came out of nowhere when ChatGPT emerged in late 2022. But as you explain, decades of research and internecine theoretical debates precipitated that moment, and a big part of how we understand AI and its threats and opportunities is down to the term artificial intelligence. How did the discipline come to be given this name, and how has this shaped the way scientists and the general public understand what AI is?