AI Predictions: From 2004's 'Computer Magic' to Today's Reality

Description

A meme that contrasts the perception of AI's future with its actual capabilities in the past. The top text reads 'Everyone: AI is the future...' followed by 'AI in 2004:'. Below this is an image of a magazine page from 2004 titled 'Friends: 20 Years Later! What They Will Look Like'. The article claims to use 'computer magic' to predict the appearance of the cast of the TV show 'Friends' in the year 2024. The page displays six images, one for each main character (Ross, Rachel, Joey, Monica, Chandler, Phoebe), showing their original photo next to a comically bad, digitally aged version. The humor stems from the hilariously poor quality and inaccuracy of the 2004 'AI' prediction, which was likely just primitive photo manipulation, compared to the sophisticated generative AI models available today. It serves as a humbling reminder of how far technology has progressed and a commentary on the long-standing hype cycle of artificial intelligence

Common Tags

AI AIHypeVsReality AIHype TechHumor TechMeme TechHistory TechNostalgia FutureOfAI

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick The 2004 'AI' was just a Photoshop plugin called 'wrinkle_filter.dll'. The 2024 AI can generate a whole new season of Friends, but it will still make Chandler's hands have six fingers

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

The 2004 'AI' was just a Photoshop plugin called 'wrinkle_filter.dll'. The 2024 AI can generate a whole new season of Friends, but it will still make Chandler's hands have six fingers
Anonymous

2004 “AI”: a Photoshop macro that adds crow’s-feet; 2024 “AI”: a Kubernetes cluster that adds crow’s-feet to your AWS bill
Anonymous

Remember when we thought 'computer magic' in 2004 meant Photoshop filters and linear regression? Now our AI hallucinates with transformer models at scale, but at least it's wrong with 175 billion parameters of confidence
Anonymous

Ah yes, 2004's 'computer magic' - back when AI predictions looked like they were generated by a Markov chain trained exclusively on potato quality JPEGs. Twenty years later, we've progressed from hilariously bad face aging algorithms to AI that can hallucinate entire codebases with confidence. The real prediction failure here? Nobody in 2004 foresaw that by 2024, we'd be debugging AI-generated code that's somehow both syntactically perfect and architecturally nonsensical. At least these face predictions were honest about their limitations - today's LLMs will confidently tell you they nailed it while serving you a function that compiles but summons Cthulhu at runtime
Anonymous

AI's been 'the future' since 2004, yet diffusion models still render Rachel Geller as a post-singularity escapee from the latent space
Anonymous

2004 AI was a Photoshop macro: if year += 20 then add gray hair; 2024 AI is a 70B-parameter version that does the same thing and bills per token
Anonymous

2004 ‘AI’ was a tabloid intern using Liquify and gray‑hair brushes; 2024 ‘AI’ is a 200B‑param model with RLHF - same confidence level, but now it bills in GPU credits
@dellism1 5y

i mean of course, this is 2004
@Mukherjee273 5y

If you remove the extra 10 kgs of fat given to their face, its kind of close
@Danich 5y

They still have 2.5 years
@NIK1357master 5y

Who tF is AL ?
1. @executor2077 5y
  
  Al Gore
  
  @NIK1357master 5y
  
  Algoretm¿)
@MagnusEdvardsson 5y

They made them chubbier, but it's not that far
@NiKryukov 5y

Uncanny Valley Generator?
@Alamgir1444 5y

Rose and Phoebe somewhat look like that