A.I. Needs a Reboot

A.I. sucks.

That’s the consensus of a public that, in the early part of this year, gave the biggest computer programming advancement in history a whopping 75% negative rating.

Frankly, it’s surprising the number isn’t higher. After all, A.I. hasn’t exactly given the public a ton of reasons to fall in love with it since it burst onto the scene. It is already eliminating jobs, eerily defying rules and laws, helping create far too many gauche executions on social media, and stealing from copyrighted works that anyone else would be punished for doing.

Consider some of the standout public relations disasters that A.I. has already been at the center of in the past few years:

• A.I. has been associated with a stupefying degree of awful and illicit activities, from real-time deepfake videos, like one that impersonated Hong Kong executives in 2024, to social media algorithms addicting children to their platforms, for which parent companies like Meta were found negligent in court just this past March.
  
• The human job market continues to shrink as A.I. replaces employees at an alarming rate. Roughly 9% of jobs globally have so far been taken over by artificial intelligence, with some estimates suggesting up to 77 million positions could be affected by automation in the next few years. Here at home, roughly 55,000 jobs in the U.S. alone were linked to A.I.-related cuts in early 2025.
  
• Too many governments, including ours, have taken a “wait and see” approach to regulating A.I., especially as they hope it will give them worldwide advantages. The White House, for example, released this statement in July of 2025: “Breakthroughs in these fields have the potential to reshape the global balance of power ... it is a national security imperative for the United States to achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance.” Sure, much of that is understandable, but how much of looking the other way is legal? And don’t get me started on how much the White House is using A.I. merely for silly memes and videos to paint POTUS as a Messiah, superhero, etc.
  
• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warned Congress in 2023 that if A.I. technology "goes wrong, it can go quite wrong," urging regulation to mitigate risks. Testifying in May of that year, he emphasized potential dangers to the world at large, including job displacement, misinformation, and societal harm. He even called for a new agency to license advanced A.I., something that should have been baked into the cake by all those developing it.

Hmmm … an out-of-control monster terrifying even its creator. Sounds a lot like Frankenstein.

And when left to its own devices without human oversight, A.I. has often been exposed as catastrophic and unethical. In a San Francisco traffic accident in May of 2024, an A.I.-powered car was involved in a traffic accident and unwittingly ended up dragging a pedestrian 20 feet. Studies have found that A.I. models give wrong information in up to 48% of cases. These systems can "hallucinate" information, fabricating, for instance, fake medical research or incorrect treatment steps. Now, compound such problems with the added cruelty of corporate America grabbing low-hanging fruit by letting A.I. eliminate experts in everything from the world of advertising to journalism to the entertainment industry, and you see how A.I. feels less like a tool for good and more like a weapon for destruction. Specifically, it seems to be fulfilling the role usually occupied by a corporate hatchet man. Just ask the thousands of MCU artists and special effects wizards rumored to be cut by Disney last month [April 2026].

And yet, despite such disheartening news, A.I. isn’t going to go away. It’s too valuable to too many professions, particularly in science, finance, and the health fields. A.I. can brilliantly simulate environmental scenarios that help fight global warming. A.I. has demonstrably strengthened cybersecurity worldwide, making many banks, companies, and consumers exponentially safer. A.I. is revolutionizing much of healthcare, making great inroads in treating diseases and detecting problems in the human body, as well as at the nano level in skin, eyes, hair, and body carriage. A.I. can even assess the ripeness of grocery store produce, help psychologists analyze patients through facial cues, and translate data and language in real time.

Still, it is wrong to assume that even such worthy uses of A.I. come close to perfection. After all, A.I. may be unbeatable at chess, but it still falls short in certain areas that almost seem ridiculous. For example, why can’t A.I. make autocorrect better than it is? Indeed, here’s hoping that one of these days, A.I. will understand the difference between the words “Ted” and “ten” when I send a text containing a “Ten Best List.”

Used properly, A.I. can even be of great assistance in The Arts, but you wouldn’t know it from some of the garish ways the entertainment and creative industries have employed the system to denigrate artists and their products so far. For starters, it’s still questionable how much of what A.I. culls together for layouts or backgrounds is legally permissible, as it has robbed many image companies and artists blind for several years. Companies are getting savvier about ensuring A.I. doesn’t infringe on copyrighted material, but it’s taken quite some time to do so.

Filmmaker/actor Ben Affleck is correct in characterizing A.I. as an incredible impressionist, a device that “can write you excellent imitative verse that sounds Elizabethan, but it cannot write you Shakespeare.” Indeed, A.I. can only create what has, in some way, been done before. It can take various parts and scramble them into something seemingly new, but it cannot brainstorm as human intelligence can, and likely will not be able to for some time. The shortcomings of A.I. remain glaringly apparent, too. For example, why can’t A.I. get the number of digits on any given hand correct in its multitude of videos created for TikTok and YouTube?

Additionally, A.I. lacks certain forms of judgment that can never be programmed, like an inherent sense of taste, nor can it appreciate the nuances of creative collaboration. That includes the subtleties of argument, shooting the bull, free-associating, and improvisation. Instinctual human morality and ethics might elude A.I. as well, but perhaps with the right teachers, it can better distinguish between good and evil than it has so far.

What A.I can do to enhance the Arts, like 3D modeling, turning written suggestions into visuals, and expanding the canvas (see how The Dome has filled out the world of The Wizard of Oz in Vegas), is readily apparent.

And just as writers can turn to a dictionary, a thesaurus, or books chock full of screenwriting tips, A.I. can streamline such efforts, too. It can supply a scribe with more unique words, grammatical suggestions, even expert proofreading—these are “gimme putts” within A.I. capabilities right now, and they’re at everyone’s fingertips. A.I. can also bring entire courses and studies to the forefront to help it critique, showcase proper or improved storytelling techniques, and even synthesize and evaluate what a writer has put on the page.

It can do all this in record time, too. It can eliminate redundancies or clarify sentences that need polishing. And by handling tedious tasks like editing, formatting, and even certain types of research, A.I. can free up a person’s cognitive resources, allowing them to focus more on the fun parts of writing and creating. Those parts that require inspiration more than perspiration.

Technically speaking, A.I. has been around for decades, particularly in CGI. CGI long ago replaced matte paintings and substantially reduced production costs. Yet those same computer graphics artists are now losing their jobs as the next step in a revolution that is getting colder and more brutal, and that’s where A.I. is being seen as a villain.

When negatives are at 75%, it is high time for damage control. That is a real challenge for everyone in the arts, let alone the world at large, as a rightfully suspicious public needs to be convinced that the great A.I. revolution is truly worth it.

To start a proper reboot, Hollywood, Washington, D.C, and the global community at large should admit they screwed up. Too many companies initially used A.I. to cut corners, jobs, and budgets. Such small-mindedness damaged the very industries they were trying to further and turned A.I. into vicious henchmen. It might even take a government-sanctioned campaign, but no matter, A.I. needs to reintroduce itself to the American public: what it is, what it is not, and why it is essential for the betterment and future of mankind.

Now, generally, you never get a second chance to make a first impression, but there are exceptions to that rule. Apple bounced back decades ago with Steve Jobs' return, reinforcing the idea of innovation, not merely the sales of easy-to-use computers. Coke overcame the tragic launch of New Coke decades ago by quickly returning to its original formula and finding flankers that did not damage its core tenets. And even something as silly as LEGO roared back from the brink of bankruptcy 15 years ago to become a renewed billion-dollar player by reinforcing the core idea of building blocks and showcasing them in a multitude of new venues, from movie houses to destination stores and events.

To properly launch A.I. to the world for its 2.0 version, the powers that be will have to spend a lot, since a national campaign costs money. Within that campaign, there should be instructional content, true-or-false interactions, and "Did you know?" questions that will go a long way toward eradicating misconceptions, as well as laying out apologies for the ridiculous mistakes made by A.I. in the past five years.

Then, to further the overall re-educational strategy, the government needs to expand A.I. education through grants, scholarships, and an extensive website that reinforces how A.I. makes a positive difference. The government spent a lot of money 15 years ago explaining what the Affordable Care Act was and was not, and the same approach should be used here to correct the ship.

The bottom-line is the public needs to be convinced that A.I. is about investing in the future, not just cutting and running for today.

It would also help to establish a dedicated, exclusive policing body to oversee the use of A.I. and potential abuses, as Mr. Altman suggested. Whether that is a U.S. government department like the FBI or FCC, or something like Interpol, remains to be seen, but no matter, A.I. deserves concentrated enforcement. The point is that the population must come to trust it anew, and that takes visible, demonstrable action when laws are being broken.

Those hoping to make a killing off A.I. need to temper their greed for the greater good of relaunching a product with far better safeguards and a strict ethical framework, too. Everyone is rushing to launch their own take on it now, but they need to proceed with caution and care.

New platforms must be created to help humans and safeguard their work from theft and abuse. The world needs to become an environment where talented people, using A.I. on all fronts, can thrive in large numbers, encouraged to aim for greatness rather than just survive amidst the ongoing threat of obsolescence.

Finally, A.I. may be considered a super-intelligence, as Mark Zuckerberg characterized it, but in almost any film, show, or play done about artificial intelligence in the last 50 years, what has been the goal of almost every A.I. robot?

To be more human.

• That is what David (Haley Joel Osment) wants in Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film A.I. Artificial Intelligence: to be a real boy and attain genuine love from his human mother.  
  
• It's the entire plot of the 2014 film Ex Machina by filmmaker Alex Garland. In his sci-fi character study, Ava (Alicia Vikander) is being tested to determine whether she can pass for human, and, indeed, it becomes her goal not only to ace that test but also to escape her imprisonment and thrive in the human world. (Spoiler to the viewer: she does.)
  
• The entire Terminator franchise by James Cameron ultimately hinges on the idea that robots can coexist with humans, despite their flaws, because humanity is what makes the world interesting. And, dare I say, striving for humanity makes the machines (like Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-800) all the more nuanced and intriguing.
  
• Even in Star Trek: First Contact from 1996, the one where Lt. Data (Brent Spiner) gets an emotional V-chip allowing him to experience a fuller variety of human emotions, the conflict is driven by the Borg Queen (Alice Krige) trying to collect as many species, including humans, into her collective. Her A.I. may be the smartest person in the room, but she still wants a super blend of machine and human to reign more powerfully.

Let’s face it, A.I. screwed up by screwing over too many on its way to market in its first years. But comeback stories are always compelling. We’ll call this one “Presenting A.I. 2.0: What We Should've Done the First Time."

But don’t worry, folks, humanity has always shown a great capacity for forgiveness.

*Featured image created by Jeffrey York