Artificial stupidity (again)

T'S so hard to know what to do!! Should I get out of AI stock now, wait a few days or weeks more and then cash in with maximum profits before the bubble bursts?

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Or maybe the bubble won't burst at all, and the millions (ahem) I have invested (ahem) in artificial intelligence companies will soon be billions.

If you've been following any of this, you'll know that some pundits wiser than you or I are saying that the enthusiasm for AI is your classic case of market over-exuberance.

Much of the hype around AI is down to the companies' claims as to what it can do and how it's going to replace a lot of expensive human employees and do what they do better. These claims are, one strongly suspects, overstated.

One list I recently saw claimed AI would replace historians. That's absolute hogwash, unless by "historian" you mean someone who can produce shortened versions of Wikipedia entries.

Historians are also there to critically assess evidence (much of which hasn't been digitised yet), interpret facts and occasionally make informed speculations. Besides which because at least once a month I try to get ChatGPT to do it - it sometimes just makes stuff up. Like the time I experimentally asked it to write me a 1000-word account of Bristol's part in transatlantic slavery; it did it superfast, and included the names of two traders I'd never heard of - because they never existed in the first place!!

Now a tale reaches me of a recent school visit to a local museum. I can't prove any of this happened exactly as I tell it, but I can believe the gist of it: