We don’t know yet to what extent familiar generative-AI problems, such as the confident presentation of false information and difficulty in understanding accented speech, may emerge once the app is rolled out to the public over the coming weeks.
Just as chatbots have promised to condense the internet into a single program, generative AI now promises to condense all of a smartphone’s functions into a single app, and to add a whole host of new ones: Text friends, draft emails, learn what the name of that beautiful flower is, call an Uber and talk to the driver in their native language, without touching a screen. Whether that future comes to pass is far from certain. Demos happen in controlled environments and are not immediately verifiable. OpenAI’s was certainly not without its stumbles, including choppy audio and small miscues. We don’t know yet to what extent familiar generative-AI problems, such as the confident presentation of false information and difficulty in understanding accented speech, may emerge once the app is rolled out to the public over the coming weeks. But at the very least, to call Siri or Google Assistant “assistants” is, by comparison, insulting.