AI Still Can’t Tell Time or Read a Calendar

If you’re in an industry being impacted by the rise of AI, take heart in knowing that these stupid algorithms still can’t figure out how to read an analog clock. Or delve even deeper into your misery knowing that it can’t read an analog clock and it’s still being entrusted with your job.

Either way, let’s all point and laugh at AI for not being able to perform a simple task.

Researchers from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland ran AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini through tests to find out how well they could read a clock face. Turns out, it can only read a clock face 25 percent of the time.

AI Still Struggles With Extremely Basic Tasks

Researchers suspect that it’s the combination of spatial awareness, context, and basic math that all combine to befuddle the chatbot. They tested out a variety of analog clock face styles. Some used Roman numerals, others had a hand that tracked seconds in addition to minutes and hours. And some of them even had colored dials.

The researchers found that the more variation there was in the clock face the more the chatbot was likely to get confused and misread the clock. The team performed a similar test but with calendars to see if the AI models could make heads or tails of a specific type of calendar that displayed an entire year’s worth of days on a single page.

That, they found, is something the AI could wrap its head around a little more easily even though it was still generally quite bad at it. ChatGPT struggled with simple questions like, “Which day of the week is New Year’s Day?”

Learning to read a clock face or a calendar is something we expect children to be able to do with some degree of proficiency by the time they hit the second grade or so. Lead author Rohit Saxena says that these limitations must be addressed if AI is to be effectively used in real-world applications like scheduling and automation.