Three and a half years of coverage, read end to end. Around fifteen thousand articles across eight publications, from MIT Technology Review through the Financial Times, The Economist, The Guardian and the New York Times to the management and consulting view of Harvard Business Review, McKinsey and BCG. What rose, what faded, and what reversed.
ChatGPT launched on 30th November 2022. Since then a wide span of titles has worked out what it meant: the technical press, the business press, the mainstream press, and the management journals. This page reads the whole record at once: when each idea arrived, which advice inflated and quietly died, and where on the media spectrum each idea lives. Use the switch to move between the four tiers and the individual publications.
Monthly AI article counts. A news story usually spikes and decays; this one is still climbing three and a half years on, with no peak in sight. Switch to indexed to set each title to 100 at ChatGPT's launch and compare growth rather than raw volume — on a log scale, because a title that started small (the New York Times began near zero) can grow many times over. The monthly journals carry far fewer articles than the dailies, so indexing is the fairer way to see who accelerated. Click any title in the key to add or remove it.
The date each name first appeared in each title (a hollow ring marks the metadata-only New York Times). Where more than one carried it, a line joins them. The order of arrival is the early history of the field, told by its nouns. Click the key to add or remove titles; use the view switch at the top for tiers or individual publications.
Not products, arguments. Each panel tracks one idea's share of monthly AI coverage, smoothed over three months. The grey area is total attention; the coloured lines are the four media tiers (or, with the view switch, the individual publications). The badge marks its trajectory; the italic line beneath is its story. The key controls every panel below — click a tier or title to add or remove it. Discovered by reading the articles, not by guessing keywords.
Ideas and advice that inflated, peaked, and faded, or reversed outright. Each is plotted with its peak marked. This is the answer to "were there bubbles of advice?": yes, and here they are, dated.
For each title: the share of issue headlines mentioning AI, month by month since 2018. The vertical line is ChatGPT. Watch the pivots: flat, flat, flat, then vertical.
The recurring arguments of this email, each plotted against attention across the whole spectrum (the management and consulting tier — HBR, McKinsey and BCG — is the one most likely to share this territory). Three kinds of territory: ideas the press is writing about now, ideas the press covered and moved on from, and ideas the press has barely touched: white space, the differentiated ground. The badge and the classification fold in every active title; click the key to focus on a tier or publication. Full text everywhere except the New York Times (headline and abstract only).
What we charted, and what we left on the table. The summary counts every idea the analysis surfaced; the list below is just the ones that did not make a chart, too broad to mean anything, too sparse to draw, or set aside. Left in deliberately, as a reading list of where the AI conversation went that this page did not follow.
Press corpus, all matched on full article text and arranged as a media spectrum across four tiers (technical, business news, mainstream news, and management & consulting): 1,118 from The Economist; 5,148 from the Financial Times; 792 from Harvard Business Review; 4,708 from The Guardian; 1,972 from MIT Technology Review; 1,454 from The New York Times; 129 from McKinsey; 462 from BCG. Collected from paid or authorised subscriptions and open APIs for private research; monthly journals run at lower volume than the dailies by design. The view switch flips every chart between the four tiers and the individual publications. Newsletter corpus: issue headlines from the newsletter archaeology archive (28 titles), masthead stripped before matching. Ideas in sections III, IV and VI were discovered by a language model reading stratified samples of each corpus, then validated by counting pattern matches across every article; concepts whose patterns matched implausibly broadly or too narrowly to chart were set aside and are listed in the cutting-room floor. Counts are shares of monthly AI coverage, smoothed over three months. Keyword matching undercounts ideas expressed obliquely. Newsletter titles were audited individually: titles with unrecovered or gap-ridden archives (Import AI, TLDR AI) are excluded, and titles without a meaningful pre-ChatGPT sample show their launch date instead of a baseline. The New York Times is matched on headline and abstract only (the Article Search API returns no article bodies), so it is drawn dashed and its matches are weaker evidence than the full-text titles; McKinsey and BCG are smaller, still-growing corpora. Status: Raw AI output. Not yet CEO'd (Checked, Edited and Owned).
This is an artefact created for David's weekly email. See the others here.