Despite all the progress being made in artificial intelligence, today’s chatbots aren’t going rogue and seducing users en masse. They aren’t generating novel bioweapons, conducting large-scale cyberattacks or causing any of the other doomsday scenarios envisioned by AI pessimists.

But they also aren’t very fun conversationalists, or the kinds of creative, charismatic AI assistants that tech optimists were hoping for — the ones who could help us make scientific breakthroughs, produce dazzling works of art or just entertain us.

Instead, most chatbots today are doing white-collar drudgery — summarizing documents, debugging code, taking notes during meetings — and helping students with their homework. That’s not nothing, but it’s certainly not the AI revolution we were promised.

In fact, the most common complaint I hear about AI chatbots today is that they’re too boring — that their responses are bland and impersonal, that they refuse too many requests and that it’s nearly impossible to get them to weigh in on sensitive or polarizing topics.

Read more:

Roose, K. (2024, February 14). The Year Chatbots Were Tamed. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/14/technology/chatbots-sydney-tamed.html