AI Sucks at Reading Clocks

These days, artificial intelligence can generate photorealistic images, write novels, do your homework, and even predict protein structures. New research, however, reveals that it often fails at a very basic task: telling time. Researchers at Edinburgh University have tested the ability of seven well-known multimodal large language models—the kind of AI that can interpret and generate various kinds of media—to answer time-related questions based on different images of clocks or calendars. Their study, forthcoming in April and currently hosted on the preprint server arXiv, demonstrates that the LLMs has difficulty with these basic tasks. “The ability to interpret and reason about time from visual inputs is critical for many real-world applications—ranging from event scheduling to autonomous systems,” the researchers wrote in the study. “Despite advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), most work has focused on object detection, image captioning, or scene understanding, lea ... Read full article.