Serious question, does anyone else remember when AI meant Clippy and a chess bot, not... this?

Holly Martin · 2026-10-09T17:55:05.364988+00:00

I was digging through an old hard drive from my college days in 2006 and found a folder of notes from a class where we built a tiny neural net in MATLAB that could barely tell handwritten 3s from 8s, and we all thought we were wizards. Fast forward to now, I use an AI tool every single day that writes half my emails and I still catch myself double checking it like it's that nervous kid in the group project. The thing people keep getting wrong is acting like this all showed up out of nowhere in the last couple of years, like someone flipped a switch in 2022. I watched this build up for almost two decades, from spam filters that finally worked to voice assistants that mostly didn't, and the curve has been bending the whole time. What bugs me is how the conversation jumped straight to robots taking jobs and nobody wants to talk about the boring middle part, where these tools quietly fixed stuff like photo sorting and autocorrect. I know because I lived it, and I still have the receipts on that drive to prove it. So what was your first real run in with this stuff, like the actual moment you went oh, this is different now?

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Serious question, does anyone else remember when AI meant Clippy and a chess bot, not... this? | AI Innovations - Pinecone Attack