This technology is losing its luster, but that means it's here to stay.
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In the first few months after the release of ChatGPT, AI chatbots felt like magic to many. The AI chatbot conjured up poems and cocktail recipes, and he was secretly doing the work of at least one writer. These programs were believed to be the first non-human beings to acquire human language, and many believed they were intelligent, even sentient. My colleague Ian Bogost wrote at the time that AI offered a way to “play text, almost any text, like a musical instrument.”
More than a year later, as I wrote about in this week's article, Ian has changed his mind. AI has exploded in popularity due to its novelty, but her initial excitement is turning into a kind of resigned acceptance. Rather than using software to fuel the imagination, he began assigning AI “the burden of being a mere mule.” task”: Coding websites, selecting students from waitlists, and conducting research on multiple students. atlantic ocean (He and subsequent fact checkers verified it). AI, like laptops and smartphones before it, has faded or been relegated to the background. The future of this technology does not depend on whether chatbots become “super-intelligent”, but simply on whether the technology continues to be useful, and whether we trust it enough to continue to use it. It may depend on whether the number of people who can rely on it continues to increase.
— Mateo Wong, Deputy Editor
AI has lost its magic
Ian Bogost
I often ask ChatGPT to write a poem in the style of American modernist poet Hart Crane. It does a great job of delivering. But the other day, when I asked the software to perform a crane operation on a plate of ice cream sandwiches, I felt bored before I even looked at the answer. “The oozing cream slips from our grasp like time / Each moment slips away with a silent gasp.” This is good. It was competent. I read the poem, shared some of it with a colleague, and closed the window. anything.
It's been a year and a half since generative AI captivated people's imaginations and my own. For months, the money I paid for ChatGPT and Midjourney felt like money better spent than my Netflix subscription, even for entertainment.I'll sit on the couch and make a cheeseburger monster meanwhile bridgerton It was played in front of me without being seen. But those days are over. The lethargy I felt as I sought out Hart Crane's paean to ice cream sandwiches seemed to mark the end of a brief, glorious phase in the history of technology. Generative AI came out of nowhere and brought with it both light and dark magic. If the show ends, it won't be because the AI turns out to be a huge failure. Quite the opposite. The tools it enables simply slip into the background, from which they exert their greatest impact.
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P.S.
AI’s trajectory appears to mirror an earlier wave of Silicon Valley hype: crypto. The crypto crash appears to have ended with the Sam Bankman Fried ruling, but digital assets have nevertheless grown into boring, but more stable, financial products, writes Will Gotsegen.
— Mateo