What Is AI Without Its Capacity for Delight?

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In the first few months after the release of ChatGPT, AI chatbots felt, to many, like magic: They conjured poems and cocktail recipes, and secretly did at least one writer’s job. These programs appeared to be the first nonhuman entity to master human language, and many people ascribed them with intelligence, even sentience. My colleague Ian Bogost wrote at the time that AI offered a way “to play text—all the text, almost—like an instrument.”

More than a year later, as he wrote in a story this week, Ian has changed his mind: While AI exploded in popularity because of its novelty, that initial excitement is giving way to a kind of resigned acceptance. Rather than using the software to fuel his imagination, he has come to assign AI “the mule-worthy burden of mere tasks”: coding a website, selecting students from a waitlist, conducting research for multiple Atlantic stories (which he, and then a fact-checker, verified). AI, like laptops and smartphones before it, has faded, or perhaps ascended, to the background. The future of the technology may not rest on whether a chatbot becomes “superintelligent” but simply on whether the technology continues to be useful, and if growing numbers of people can trust it enough to consistently rely on it.

— Matteo Wong, associate editor

AI Has Lost Its Magic

By Ian Bogost

I frequently ask ChatGPT to write poems in the style of the American modernist poet Hart Crane. It does an admirable job of delivering. But the other day, when I instructed the software to give the Crane treatment to a plate of ice-cream sandwiches, I felt bored before I even saw the answer. “The oozing cream, like time, escapes our grasp, / Each moment slipping with a silent gasp.” This was fine. It was competent. I read the poem, Slacked part of it to a colleague, and closed the window. Whatever.

A year and a half has passed since generative AI captured the public imagination and my own. For many months, the fees I paid to ChatGPT and Midjourney felt like money better spent than the cost of my Netflix subscription, even just for entertainment. I’d sit on the couch and generate cheeseburger kaiju while Bridgerton played, unwatched, before me. But now that time is over. The torpor that I felt in asking for Hart Crane’s ode to an ice-cream sandwich seemed to mark the end point of a brief, glorious phase in the history of technology. Generative AI appeared as if from nowhere, bringing magic, both light and dark. If the curtain on that show has now been drawn, it’s not because AI turned out to be a flop. Just the opposite: The tools that it enables have only slipped into the background, from where they will exert their greatest influence.

Read the full article.

What to Read Next

• The AI Mona Lisa explains everything: “Depending on how you look at it, generative AI is either astonishingly powerful or totally pointless,” Caroline Mimbs Nyce writes.
• Welcome to a world without endings: “Thanks to AI, every painting can now have an expanded border, every minor character a ChatGPT-written spinoff series,” Charlie Warzel writes.
• How ChatGPT will destabilize white-collar work: “No technology in modern memory has caused mass job loss among highly educated workers. Will generative AI be an exception?” Annie Lowrey asks.

P.S.

AI’s trajectory appears to mirror a prior wave of Silicon Valley hype: crypto. The crypto crash has seemingly concluded with Sam Bankman-Fried’s sentencing, yet the digital assets have matured into a more stable, if boring, financial instrument, Will Gottsegen writes.

— Matteo