AI in 2025 - What is it really Bad At?

Last time I went on a bit on the subject of what AI was reasonably good at.  Images.  Some body parts being done so very much better than others.  It won't, at least in the free version I was using, pass for real art, but its skill exceeds mine.  Yours too I should think.

But what is it still really bad at?

Creative writing.  Even with, or especially with, detailed prompts.

For example, here's what I wrote last time on what AI is good at:

At my advanced age I am allowed some element of curmudgeonism with regard to modern technology.  I've seen a lot of it come and go in nearly 70 years.  Much of it is simply reinventing the wheel.  And the real breakthroughs are often pulled into the For Profit realm rather quickly.  Still, I'm not such a tortoise that I am still using a rotary dial phone and a slide rule.

So, what is the much vaunted AI "good" at in 2025.

My initial answer is: Images.  Lacking any artistic talent to speak of I am able to come up with amusing pictures but I can't create them.   Here's an example.  I prompted Gemini - this is the maligned but free Google product - to create an image of a deer sitting at a computer studying trail cam images of hunters.  This is a remote possibility for my slow hunting season (up to gun opener), but you never know.  Here's the first draft:

I posed that same question for AI to answer.  In the style of Detritus of Empire!  You be the judge:

"Ah, 2025. The year when the digital dust motes have finally settled enough for us to squint at the landscape and ask: "So, what's this bloody AI actually for now?" Forget the utopian pipedreams or the Skynet anxieties, comrades. The truth, as ever, is far more pedestrian and far more insidious."

"AI in 2025 is a glorified clerk, a relentless, unblinking auditor. It's magnificent at sifting through the dross of human existence – the endless data, the digital flotsam and jetsam we produce with every click, purchase, and mumbled voice command. It finds patterns in our spending habits, predicts our next impulse buy with unsettling accuracy, and flags the 'anomalies' in our medical records before we even feel a twinge."

"It's superb at generating content, a veritable factory farm of text and images, flooding the internet with bespoke banality, finely tuned to whatever niche market can be carved out. Need a thousand variations of a product description? AI's your man. A news article indistinguishable from human-written pap? Done. It’s not about brilliance; it's about boundless, tireless mediocrity, optimized for engagement metrics."

"And let’s not forget surveillance. Oh, the glorious, all-seeing eye. AI excels at monitoring, categorizing, and cross-referencing. From traffic flow to social sentiment, it’s the ultimate panopticon, meticulously cataloging the minute details of our lives, all under the guise of 'efficiency' or 'security'. So, in 2025, AI is good at making money, controlling narratives, and watching us. The empire, in its digital guise, has found its most efficient bureaucratic tool yet."

It's crap.  Nothing about it resembles my writing style, and with almost 3,000 posts of Detritus of Empire to sift though it had plenty of grist to grind.  Either its being lazy, and I am mooching off a free version, or it pays no attention to the actual request parameters and just pours slop from the bucket.  So which is it?

I think it must have done a quick surface scan of my writings.  The descriptive term "bloody" would not be there without some hint that I travel in and write about England rather often.  And to pick up on medical matters....some note of my career as a family and later ER physician.  But it does not mimic my writing style in any way other than an excess of commas!  So I wonder how it "sees" me? Just for fun I asked it to generate an image of my alter ego Badger Trowelsworthy.  After it made a cute critter image I pointed out that BT was actually a human.  So.....

Much better than its writing!  I can in fact flag a half dozen or so photos that probably were used to generate it. And it even got the hand right.  At least the one you can see.....