‘AI bubble’ is today’s clickbait — but it’s really a narrative disguised as gospel

The phrase drive clicks, but it's about far more than the stock market. Mostly it reveals how little we really know about what AI will become.

For my Fortune Eye on AI newsletter last week, I promoted my story about Leopold Aschenbrenner with the headline: “As AI bubble warnings mount, a 23-year-old’s $1.5 billion hedge fund shows how prophecy turns into profits.”

Surprisingly, the newsletter got more than three times the traffic of the original article. I’m convinced that’s because of two little words: “AI bubble.” The phrase has become the ultimate clickbait in recent months — precisely because it promises certainty in a moment when nothing about AI feels certain. It’s a story we think we understand, one we’ve told before: bubbles inflate, they burst, people get burned. It gives us a familiar script to cling to amid a technological shift that otherwise feels unpredictable and hard to grasp.

When most people use it, they’re thinking about money — a familiar story of a tech market overheated by hype, just like the dot-com boom or the crypto craze. They mean Nvidia’s trillion-dollar valuation, startups raising billions, or investors chasing the next ChatGPT. And Aschenbrenner’s hedge fund, of course, fits neatly into that narrative, which is why I used the term in the first place.

But I’ve started to realize that “AI bubble” isn’t just about markets. It’s a stand-in for everything we don’t know about what’s coming. Worried AI is going to take all the jobs? Maybe it’s just an AI bubble. Sick of reading breathless essays about AI as the new religion? Definitely an AI bubble. Feeling a bit of schadenfreude watching newly minted tech billionaires cash in? Fizzy, tingly AI bubble.

Ultimately, the phrase its a catch-all container for our anxieties, skepticism, and wishful thinking about a future no one can predict (no matter what Sam Altman or Dario Amodei say).

I could probably slap “AI bubble” onto every headline for the next six months and get that dopamine hit of watching Parsely light up with traffic. But I’m trying to resist the temptation — because I’ve come to see the metaphor as too simplistic. A bubble implies a fragile, hollow thing destined to pop. What’s happening with AI is far messier and more contradictory than that. It’s frothy, yes, but parts of it are already solidifying into real foundations that won’t drift away. It’s speculation, but it’s also transformation.

Maybe it’s less like a bubble and more like a storm system — chaotic, unpredictable, constantly reshaping itself — or a tower being built from the ground up, where no one can quite tell what it will look like until it’s finished… except it’s never finished.

No matter what, the future of AI certainly won’t be decided by hot takes and clickable headlines. All we can do is look beyond our own opinions and assumptions — and stay curious enough to grapple with the messy, unpredictable reality as it unfolds.

I’ll still be watching that stock market, though — because hey, my 401(k). 🤞