2024: A Year of AI Advancements, Oddities, and Societal Impact

2024: The year AI drove everyone crazy

It's been a wild year in tech thanks to the intersection between humans and artificial intelligence. 2024 brought a parade of AI oddities, mishaps, and wacky moments that inspired odd behavior from both machines and man. From AI-generated rat genitals to search engines telling people to eat rocks, this year proved that AI has been having a weird impact on the world. Why the weirdness? If we had to guess, it may be due to the novelty of it all. Generative AI and applications built upon Transformer-based AI models are still so new that people are throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. People have been struggling to grasp both the implications and potential applications of the new technology. Riding along with the hype, different types of AI that may end up being ill-advised, such as automated military targeting systems, have also been introduced. It's worth mentioning that aside from crazy news, we saw fewer weird AI advances in 2024 as well. For example, Claude 3.5 Sonnet launched in June held off the competition as a top model for most of the year, while OpenAI's o1 used runtime compute to expand GPT-4o's capabilities with simulated reasoning. Advanced Voice Mode and NotebookLM also emerged as novel applications of AI tech, and the year saw the rise of more capable music synthesis models and also better AI video generators, including several from China. Early in the year, things got off to an exciting start when OpenAI's ChatGPT experienced a significant technical malfunction that caused the AI model to generate increasingly incoherent responses, prompting users on Reddit to describe the system as "having a stroke" or "going insane." During the glitch, ChatGPT's responses would begin normally but then deteriorate into nonsensical text, sometimes mimicking Shakespearean language. OpenAI later revealed that a bug in how the model processed language caused it to select the wrong words during text generation, leading to nonsense outputs (basically the text version of what we at Ars now call "jabberwockies"). The company fixed the issue within 24 hours, but the incident led to frustrations about the black box nature of commercial AI systems and users' tendency to anthropomorphize AI behavior when it malfunctions.

What Happened in AI in 2024, And What Will the New Year Bring?

ChatGPT: Oh 2024 was a landmark year for AI. There was rapid technological progress and growing societal debate. And there was lots of me! Just joking. But one of the remarkable advances that happened in artificial intelligence this year was that leading AI models, like the famous ChatGPT "large language model" (LLM) from OpenAI, actually became useful in summarizing information and accessing up-to-date info, just like a "traditional" search engine like Google. And it's fair to say that ChatGPT dominated the AI show. ChatGPT Dominates OpenAI remained the biggest name in AI this year despite a dramatic leadership tussle that left the company a bit shaken at the start of the year. It consolidated its position by releasing new tools and more advanced AI through 2024. Its most controversial and impressive advance was the GPT-4o model, which is able to carry out audio chats with uncomfortably human-like voices -- including a controversy about sounding too much like actor Scarlett Johansson.