There is a long history of fictional and film depictions of the arrival of androids or robots equipped with artificial intelligence. The same was not true of the advent of social media. Yet the impact of social media on our society, and our democracies has been much more severe so far than the advent of artificial intelligence, and we should be and many of us are just as concerned about it. This isn’t news, but it sets the OpenAI ChatGPT hype in context.