If you feel like you’ve seen the video below – “Clichés”, by Hiérophante –  it may be because you helped create it with your unimaginative selfies.  It was created by manually editing together 1834 Instagram photos, and displays the hashtags used to find them. But there may be another reason it looks familiar (more below).

Another reason it might seem familiar is that it’s remarkably similar to a video created two years ago for The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, to visually represent the made-up word “vemödalen”, which means “the frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist”.

So you may have noticed that there was no mention here of that amazing technology teased in the headline. That’s another cliché. Imply in some ill-conceived blog post that something is true about something, and then never demonstrate it. Like when the web was abuzz recently with an AI created music video. Which wasn’t at all created by an AI.