AI’s Brain Fog Won’t Stop a Reckoning for the Arts
It will take a few more years for banks and health-care firms to solve AI’s hallucination problem, but creative industries already face some harsh disruptions.
Fact or fiction?
Photographer: Richard A. Brooks/AFP/Getty Images
Ever notice how science fiction gets things wrong about future technology? Instead of flying cars, we got viral tweets that fueled culture wars. Instead of a fax machine on your wrist, we got memes. We’re having a similar reality check with artificial intelligence. Sci-fi painted a future with computers that delivered reliable information in robotic parlance. Yet businesses who’ve tried plugging generative AI tools into their infrastructure have found, with some dismay, that the tools “hallucinate” and make mistakes. They are hardly reliable. And the tools themselves aren’t stiff and mechanistic either. They’re almost whimsical.
“We thought AI would be ‘The Terminator’ but it turned out to be Picasso,” says Neil Katz, founder of EyeLevel.ai, a startup that helps companies get generative AI models to try and work with 95% accuracy when plugged into their data. It will take another three to five years of tinkering before that level of reliability becomes widespread with AI, Katz predicts, meaning that the technology can be substantially useful to the core operations of finance or health-care companies. That doesn’t mean generative AI isn’t already having an industry-transforming impact, though. It’s just not happening in the way that its creators envisioned.