A lot of people still seem convinced that AI will replace every job on Earth, despite the fact that the tech still struggle with simple math. As the AI hype wears increasingly thin, that gap between hype and reality is becoming impossible to ignore.
The large language models making up the world’s favorite chatbots might be powerful compared to the predictive text algorithms that came before them, but they’re far from the epoch-defining super intelligence many have assumed is right around the corner.
In one since-deleted thread posted on the Reddit forum r/singularity, an AI aficionado posed what they clearly thought was a brilliant question: “why hasn’t AI text generation massively disrupted books yet, when it’s technically capable?”
“Language and writing are the strongest abilities of LLMs, since they’re LLMs,” the user continued. “And yet, people are still reading human made books. Why is that?”
“Just ask the LLM to write you the sequel to your favorite [H]arry [P]otter novel, and it will,” they enthused.
The answer, as some pointed out in the comments, has to do with LLMs’ lack of an ability to concentrate. As the length of an AI chatbot’s response grows, so too does its inability to keep everything cohesive, a debilitating limitation known as “context rot.” Context rot is why you never see individual AI-generated video clips longer than a few seconds, or full-length books that humans actually want to read.
Books aren’t the only thing tech optimists expected AI to devour. In a separate post on X-formerly-Twitter, OpenAI staffer Ryan Brewer expressed frustration that AI “didn’t create an educational renaissance.”
“Shouldn’t I be able to learn a language in a month?” Brewer asked in a post that quickly earned over 2.1 million views. “What did we get wrong?”
The reality, of course, is that attempts to integrate AI into education have been consistently disastrous. As it turns out, a technology that spits out a confident mixture of fact and fiction without challenging the user to track down or digest information on their own isn’t conducive to particularly effective schooling.
“It’s so f**king depressing that so many people think this is how learning works,” one user quipped.
Another simply shared a screenshot of an AI chatbot’s textbox containing the prompt: “learn for me.”
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