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.