Why Are So Many AI Chatbots 'Dumb as Rocks'?

Amazon announced a new AI-powered chatbot last month — still under development — 'to help you figure out what to buy,' writes the Washington Post. Their conclusion? '[T]he chatbot wasn't a disaster. But I also found it mostly useless...'

'The experience encapsulated my exasperation with new types of AI sprouting in seemingly every technology you use. If these chatbots are supposed to be magical, why are so many of them dumb as rocks?'

I thought the shopping bot was at best a slight upgrade on searching Amazon, Google or news articles for product recommendations... Amazon's chatbot doesn't deliver on the promise of finding the best product for your needs or getting you started on a new hobby.

In one of my tests, I asked what I needed to start composting at home. Depending on how I phrased the question, the Amazon bot several times offered basic suggestions that I could find in a how-to article and didn't recommend specific products... When I clicked the suggestions the bot offered for a kitchen compost bin, I was dumped into a zillion options for countertop compost products. Not helpful... Still, when the Amazon bot responded to my questions, I usually couldn't tell why the suggested products were considered the right ones for me. Or, I didn't feel I could trust the chatbot's recommendations.

I asked a few similar questions about the best cycling gloves to keep my hands warm in winter. In one search, a pair that the bot recommended were short-fingered cycling gloves intended for warm weather. In another search, the bot recommended a pair that the manufacturer indicated was for cool temperatures, not frigid winter, or to wear as a layer under warmer gloves... I did find the Amazon chatbot helpful for specific questions about a product, such as whether a particular watch was waterproof or the battery life of a wireless keyboard.

But there's a larger question about whether technology can truly handle this human-interfacing task. 'I have also found that other AI chatbots, including those from ChatGPT, Microsoft and Google, are at best hit-or-miss with shopping-related questions...'

These AI technologies have potentially profound applications and are rapidly improving. Some people are making productive use of AI chatbots today. (I mostly found helpful Amazon's relatively new AI-generated summaries of customer product reviews.)

But many of these chatbots require you to know exactly how to speak to them, are useless for factual information, constantly make up stuff and in many cases aren't much of an improvement on existing technologies like an app, news articles, Google or Wikipedia. How many times do you need to scream at a wrong math answer from a chatbot, botch your taxes with a TurboTax AI, feel disappointed at a ChatGPT answer or grow bored with a pointless Tom Brady chatbot before we say: What is all this AI junk for...?
'When so many AI chatbots overpromise and underdeliver, it's a tax on your time, your attention and potentially your money,' the article concludes.

'I just can't with all these AI junk bots that demand a lot of us and give so little in return.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.