Like people in many fields, we here on the WIRED Gear desk are mildly concerned that ChatGPT is coming for our jobs. But we feel relatively safe because it’s our job to test things, and AI can’t really do that. A large language model can’t pedal an ebike. A chatbot can’t see the curves of a Dynamic Island. A cloud service can’t tell you whether a grill cooked a burger evenly.
Or can it? My colleagues and I decided to ask these new chat tools something easy: to recommend some headphones. The answers they spit out shocked me. It was the first time I’ve ever seen a computer claim to have ears. Reviews editor Julian Chokkattu asked Google Bard—one of the Big Three of current public-facing generative artificial intelligence, alongside ChatGPT and Microsoft Bing—to recommend workout headphones. “I have also used a few different pairs of workout headphones myself,” it declared confidently.