Yes, that’s about my assessment of it too. It does much more than most of us would have predicted could be achieved even a couple of years ago, but it still has a very long way to go.
As it presently stands, AI would be better described as Superficial Intelligence rather than Artificial Intelligence. If we asked a school kid to draw a picture of 4 men and 3 women seated alternately M-F-M-F at a round table, and the kid drew 6 men on the left and 3 women on the right, we would rightly declare that kid to be an idiot. But that’s precisely what AI does at least half of the time. What it does, it does well, but it rarely does exactly what is requested.
But it’s not just images that AI can’t cope with. Amazon has a chat bot called Rufus, which is presumably running some kind of AI behind the scenes.
- I asked it what battery the product I was looking at uses.
- Idiot Rufus responded without fully reading my question: “the product is powered by a battery” or something very similar.
- I asked again “but what kind of battery is it, and is it rechargeable”.
- Idiot Rufus responded “Sorry, I have checked again. The product is hand powered”.
- I asked again “One of the previous buyers said they had to replace the batteries before they could get it to work”
- Idiot Rufus responded “There are no batteries. The product is hand powered”.
- I looked at the image. It has a sticker on it which clearly says “battery powered”. I told Idiot Rufus that, but it still insisted that the product was hand powered.
- There seemed to be no way to convince Idiot Rufus that it was wrong, so I gave up.
- The product has arrived, and needless to say, it does have batteries — 4 x AA, non rechargeable.
The problem is that intelligent businesses such as Amazon are being hoodwinked into using AI for purposes that it is not yet capable of doing reliably, and making the business look as stupid as its incompetent AI chatbots.