AI chatbots are getting so good people are starting to see them as human. Several users have recently called the bots their best friends, others have professed their love, and a Google engineer even helped one hire a lawyer. From a product standpoint, these bots are extraordinary. But from a research perspective, the people dreaming about AI reaching human-level intelligence are due for a reality check.
Chatbots today are trained only on text, a debilitating limitation. Ingesting mountains of the written word can produce jaw-dropping results — like rewriting Eminem in Shakespearean style — but it prevents perception of the nonverbal world. Much of human intelligence isn’t marked down. We pick up our innate understanding of physics, craft and emotion not by reading, but by living.