Enough About AI

Dónal and Ciarán are back to discuss some of the various costs of AI, as we reach the middle of 2026 and see the AI valuation bubble and its associated hype continue to expand. In this episode, the focus is on data centres - especially in Ireland - as well as a range of the costs of AI that demand our attention at a time when the focus is usually on the opportunities instead.
Topics in this episode:
The environmental costs of data centres - in Ireland and elsewhere - as gas-fired electricity generation is needed to feed the growing demand for compute power
The electricity costs for households in Ireland, linked to our national policies to become a data centre hub and a "cautionary tale" according to the UN
The costs for jobs and discussion of recent job losses in Ireland's tech sector
The increased token-based costs of using AI as subsidised usage decreases and companies and users get bigger bills
The information and truth costs as AI contributes slop and summarises search results in new ways, often obfuscating sources and validity
The social and democratic costs of AI misinformation, breakdown of public consultation and a bleak future of work
Resources & Links:
Reporting by the Irish Times on Ireland being branded a "cautionary tale" in a recent UN report
"Data centres have drained €715 million from the Irish economy" - The report from Friends of the Earth referred to in this episode 
The Journal's excellent project tracking Data Centres (2025)
Ed Zitron's discussion of Microsoft's Token Billing for GitHub CoPilot
Axios reporting on ballooning AI-usage costs as token-billing ramps up
&udm=14 - the parameter Dónal mentions that can be added to Google URLs to disable the AI-first version of search results (Tedium). Another related discussion on Tom's Hardware.
Politico's reporting on the European Parliament abandoning Google as their search engine in favour of Qwant
The Guardian's reporting on the senior Australian academic who used AI to author their "don't rely on AI" opinion piece. 
Magnifica Humanitas - Pope Leo's papal encyclical on AI and humanity. 
You can get in touch with us - hello@enoughaboutai.com - where we'd love to hear your questions, comments or suggestions!

Dónal and Ciarán return for a new year of new updates and new concerns in the world of Generative Artificial Intelligence. Again for 2026, the podcast will provide roughly quarterly updates on major themes and topics and this Spring episode covers recent news and connects with older themes and conversations.
Topics in this episode
"BUBBLEWATCH" - new precarious developments in the massive valuations of a small number of tech companies at the forefront of AI development, and some concerns about stock prices and where future income will come from to cover the escalating costs.
Grok (xAI) and the fallout from the use of the tool in generating non-consensual sexual imagery - and its wider impact in raising awareness about unregulated uses.
Agentic AI and the rise of OpenClaw - a framework for providing semi-autonomous AI task management, which has seen recent swift uptake and security concerns.
Related discussion of the MoltBook story, and perceptions about insight into what AI is thinking
AI Hype and recent viral articles, and their effect in driving worried people to purchase subscriptions 
Safer Internet Day and how people, especially parents, can take a more critical look at safe and appropriate use of AI tools
Resources & Links
Safer Internet Day resources on AI for teachers and parents
Matt Shumer's viral article, Something Big is Coming, and Ed Zitron's very  critical podcast rebuttal, which also contains an annotated version of the original.
Coverage of Meta's patent on AI impersonation of dead users, and Meta's troubling memo indicating their desire to use political turmoil to cover release of a controversial feature
An example of the MoltBook hype, from the Guardian
Coverage of AI as a threat to democracy in Ireland
You can get in touch with us - hello@enoughaboutai.com - where we'd love to hear your questions, comments or suggestions!

Dónal and Ciarán return with more "Bubble Watch", reporting on the latest expansion in valuations, hype, and attempts to find new ways to commercialise AI. Among those potential avenues to income, they discuss emerging AI robots, OpenAI's decision to allow AI erotica for adults, and the push to get AI into education - as well as the associated concerns. This last quarterly update for 2025 draws together some themes that you've identified in your submitted comments and questions and tries to end on a little hope amid a lot of anxiety!

Topics in the episode
The AI Bubble gets bubblier - OpenAI's quarterly loss reports, Sam Altman's angry interviews, and the beginnings of a withdrawal of money from key parts of the AI economy.
AI hardware in the form of robots like the recent XPENG demo and renewed concerns about labour replacement and military applications.
OpenAI's hope of monetising via erotica.
AI disinformation in the Irish Presidential election, as well as related stories in the Netherlands and elsewhere
The unsuitability of mainstream GenAI tools to educational contexts and recent research on their associated Cognitive Deficit in learning contexts
Top-down vs Bottom-up reactions and responses to AI in our lives and work

Resources & Links
The widely circulated images describing the circular investment within AI include this famous example from Bloomberg Reporting
Recent reporting on the topic is widespread but includes these examples from WSJ, NYT, Ars Technica, Business Insider, etc., etc. 
MIT NANDA report on 95% of AI integration showing no return on investment
MIT Media Lab's research on Cognitive Deficit and AI
Reporting on the XPENG humanoid robot (Euronews)
Reporting from Ciarán's colleagues at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in a Digital Dispatch on Russian state content surfacing in Chatbot outputs
More discussion of "LLM Grooming & Data Voids" in this Harvard Kennedy School paper.
Fact Check reporting from TheJournal on AI videos in the Irish Presidential Election, including the infamous Catherine Connolly withdrawal fake video
Reporting from Politico on AI Deepfakes in European Elections
You can get in touch with us - hello@enoughaboutai.com - where we'd love to hear your questions, comments or suggestions!

Dónal and Ciarán explore the increasingly looming questions about the overinflation of the major AI companies' valuations and the anxiety about whether we are in a bubble - and what might happen if it pops. Relevant to their discussion of the need for AI models to keep the hype levels high, they discuss the muted reception to the release of ChatGPT-5 and some of the emerging strategies to make AI chatbots more palatable to certain audiences who are worried about "woke".
Topics in this episode
Are we in an AI bubble? Spoiler alert: Yes - based on any normal metric of what an investment bubble is - but why is the promise of an almost-there superintelligence keeping things from popping?
Despite being in a bubble, the lasting impacts of where AI already is on jobs and society is discussed
The recent release of ChatGPT-5 has led to negative feedback from the tech press and vocal users - this is contrasted with other recent version releases.
Examining how AI companies are trying to find new ways to add value, leading to a discussion of "Third Devices" and AI hardware
The limitations and diminishing returns of training on synthetic data - and the apparent slowing down in model progress
AI & Ideology - what does it mean to have a non-woke AI?
Resources & Links
The Economist story mentioned by Dónal: "AI valuations are verging on the unhinged - Unless superintelligence is just around the corner" (25 June 2025)
Article in TheJournal.ie on "Brendan", the AI Dublin Tour Guide
ChatGPT's dodgy graph is linked and discussed here: "OpenAI gets caught vibe graphing" (The Verge, 07 August)
Sam Altman (OpenAI) tells venture capitalists that he will take billions of their money and build AGI - and then ask it how to make a return on the investment  (Twitter Video, Warren Terra)
Some good discussion on the struggles of agentive AI ("AI Agents have, so far, mostly been a dud", Gary Marcus, Substack)
Apple's important recent paper on the limitations of "reasoning" within tested reasoning models is available as a PDF here
Coverage of Truth Social's deal with Perplexity - to make a non-woke chatbot for the platform
You can get in touch with us - hello@enoughaboutai.com - where we'd love to hear your questions, comments or suggestions!

Dónal and Ciarán continue the 2025 season with a second quarterly update that looks at some recent themes in AI development. They're pondering doom again, as we increasingly grapple with the evidence that AI systems are powerfully persuasive and full of flattery at the same time as our ability to meaningfully supervise them seems to be diminishing.
Topics in this episode
Can we see how reasoning models reason? If AI is thinking, or sharing information and it's not in human language, how can we check that it's aligned with our values. 
This interpretability issue is tied to the concept of neuralese - inscrutable machine thoughts!
We discuss the predictions and prophetic doom visions of the AI-2027 document
Increasing ubiquity and sometimes invisibility of AI, as it's inserted into other products. Is this more enshittification? 
AI is becoming a persuasion machine - we look at the recent issues on Reddit's r/ChangeMyView, where researchers skipped good ethics practice but ended up with worrying results
We talk about flattery, manipulation, and Eli Yudkowsky's AI-Box thought experiment
Resources & Links
The AI-2027 piece, from Daniel Kokotajlo et al. is a must-read!
Dario Amodei's latest essay, The Urgency of Interpretability
T.O.P.I.C. - A detailed referencing model for indicating the use of GenAI Tools in academic assignments. 
Yudkowsky's AI-box Experiment, described on his site.
"The Worst Internet-Research Ethics Violation I Have Ever Seen" - coverage of the University of Zurich / Reddit study, by Tom Barlett for The Atlantic
ChatGPT wants us to buy things via our AI conversations (reported by Reece Rogers, for Wired)
You can get in touch with us - hello@enoughaboutai.com - where we'd love to hear your questions, comments or suggestions!