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Chatbots promise a future that will never arrive

Conversing with your computer has been a dream of futurists and technologists for decades. But even after 20 years of development, chatbots still haven’t caught on in the ways we were told they would.

Talking to your computer in the not-so-good old days meant typing into a window and watching the machine attempt a facsimile of the act of conversation rather than the real thing. Don’t forget when Sports Illustrated tried to use AI-generated content that boldly claimed volleyball could be “tricky to get into, especially without an actual ball to practice with.” No wonder so many of these systems are, as Bloomberg reported last year, propped up by underpaid human labor. Of course, the form’s boosters will suggest it’s early days and, like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said recently, we still need billions of dollars in more chip research and development.

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