In a certain, strange way, generative AI peaked with OpenAI's GPT-2 seven years ago. Little known to anyone outside of tech circles, GPT-2 excelled at producing unexpected answers. It was creative. 'You could be like, 'Continue this story: The man decided to take a shower,' and GPT-2 would be like, 'And in the shower, he was eating his lemon and thinking about his wife,'' Katy Gero, a poet and computer scientist who has been experimenting with language models since 2017, told me. 'The models won't do that anymore.' AI leaders boast about their models' superhuman technical abilities. The technology can predict protein structures, create realistic videos, and build apps with a single prompt. But these executives and researchers also readily admit that they have not yet released a model that writes well. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has predicted that large language models will soon be capable of 'fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics,' but in an...
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