Generative AI Is Not a Magic Wand
It is time to update expectations
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I wrote this article on May 26th, 2023 — more than a year ago and just half a year after the release of ChatGPT. I chose to repost it today because it’s quite prescient. At the time, many people called generative AI revolutionary. I warned: “Very few things in history have withstood the test of time to be called ‘revolutionary’. Generative AI doesn’t seem to be one of them.” So far, I’m not wrong. In any case, it makes no sense to preemptively qualify as revolutionary an innovation that has not yet proven itself worthy of the burden of such responsibility. It is time to update expectations.
There’s a gap between what we imagined we could do with generative AI and what we can actually do. A divergence between expectations and reality. François Chollet says that people love to imagine what AI can create but “not so much the actual reality of using it.”
This wasn’t at all clear a couple of months ago. Only firsthand experience with state-of-the-art tools contrasted with our preconceptions provides such a powerful…
