"Every time you sit down and actually work with artificial intelligence you become aware of the limitations of what we're able to do and what we know how to do," says Georgia Tech associate professor Mark Riedl, who spoke to us about his story and game generation projects. "Oftentimes scientists like myself like to extol the virtues of what we're working on without talking about the limitations and the boundaries that we have."

Those limitations are stark. Artificial intelligence agents are currently highly focused. They mostly exist to accomplish one task – telling stories, for instance, or perhaps serving personalized ads to Facebook users – and have no idea how to do anything else. Colton notes that it's "painfully difficult" to get it to accomplish even the most unintelligent of intelligent tasks. And he thinks the idea of a singularity – some sudden moment where AI goes from dumb to hyper-intelligent – is misguided.

"It's not like the physical sciences," he explains. "There are no breakthroughs in AI. Certainly not in the 15 years that I've been going to conferences. There are things which come to the fore and become very successful, and AI is full of success, but there's no moment where we split the atom, put a man on the moon, cure a disease. That just doesn't happen. Things are incrementally, slowly, carefully done."

Game-developing AI ANGELINA creator Michael Cook puts a different spin on it. "Driving a car from A to B is not the hard part," he notes. "The hard part is having a chat with the passenger on the way there." The first of those we can now do; the second not so much.