I received a press release this week about curiosity, which was curious, as I was already honing a theory about curiosity becoming both the next media buzzword and an in-vogue screen commodity that takes human form as Ryan Gosling.
I’ve lived through a few media buzzwords in my time, and they usually involve a default trait or practice morphing into something that will be consciously trumpeted in online profiles, corporate presentations and miscellaneous self-aggrandising statements as if it were new.
“Storytelling” used to be the big, annoying one. “Relevance” also enjoyed a spell in the sun. My sense is that “creativity”, “connection” and the rest will soon be pushed out to make way for “curiosity”. The word has already infiltrated our interview-speak, our advertising slogans, our bullet points.
I don’t mean this to sound sinister. It’s just another way of promoting the foundation of journalism, which is to ask who, what, when, where, why, how and “can you even give me a ballpark figure?”.
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The press release that piqued my interest is not from a media company but the artificial-intelligence industry, as represented by one heavily AI-embedded conglomerate. “Research commissioned by Samsung into everyday AI usage shows that nearly half (48 per cent) of people feel more curious than they did before AI became part of daily life,” it begins.
This huge-if-true finding is attributed to research conducted among a sample of 1,000 nationally representative adults in Ireland in January, a month when the main things I’m curious about are duvet tog values and the prevalence of flu.
There is other survey data, but it’s not as interesting as the reason why this research was commissioned. The AI industry can hear what people say about it. “Prompt culture” can signify a habit of trusting machines to do things we are capable of doing ourselves – a way of outsourcing our thinking – and that’s how it has been characterised by the loose alliance of horrified humans I like to call the AI resistance movement. Samsung is keen to snuff out that criticism.
That’s not my presumption but its transparent aim. The electronics company claims its survey “dismantles the myth that AI might be hindering critical thinking or making us lazy”, just in case you thought it was doing exactly that.
The line that triggers existential alarm for me is Samsung’s advice for “mastering” AI prompts, which includes the suggestion that we “ask AI to role-play expertise” to get better answers. Back off, AI. Role-playing as an expert is a journalist’s job.
Talking about curiosity has long had special currency for media brands that want to flatter the intelligence of their audience – or avoid treating them like idiots, to put it another way. It’s less about clickbait trickery, more of a pact to explore together. Not all rabbit holes are bad.
It was no surprise to see the word repeatedly pop up in December when BBC Radio 4 announced that Misha Glenny would succeed Melvyn Bragg as presenter of In Our Time, the programme billed as “essential listening for the intellectually curious”. Glenny assured listeners that he shared their “deep curiosity about the world and the ideas that shape it” and paid tribute to his predecessor’s “forensic curiosity”.
Worryingly, news outlets are now having to overtly defend the kind of curiosity that the powerful don’t like. “Curiosity is the fuel of a functioning democracy” was the verdict of NPR’s chief marketing officer, Mishka Pitter-Armand, as the American public-media organisation last month launched an advertising campaign with the tagline “For your right to be curious”.
Being inquisitive about the machinations of power has rarely yielded fast answers, and in the post-shame political environment such curiosity is even harder to satisfy. But this same climate of aggression and anti-intellectualism has, somewhat oddly, served to make cinema’s latest reluctant hero stand out as a refreshing, optimistic ideal.
In Project Hail Mary, the biggest Hollywood film of 2026 so far, Gosling’s Ryland Grace is a bumbling nerd who can’t remember how he ended up in space. He nevertheless exhibits the open-mindedness and humble charm required to befriend an alien rock and collaborate on a plan to save the universe.
“We’re capable of being more than we think that we are,” Gosling told a science podcast called, ahem, Curiosity Theory.
Perhaps Project Hail Mary’s success will see curiosity fuel something almost as important as functioning democracies: a new spate of watchable blockbusters. The capacity to admit you’re wrong, acknowledge what you don’t know and retain the patience to search for information is, after all, a highly appealing characteristic. Being certain about everything is not – well, probably not.
So the marketing memo is “be more Ryan Gosling (and please buy what we’re selling)”. There’s a small disclaimer. Calling someone a “curious person”, even if intended as a compliment, might not be taken that way.
