AIs are easily acing the SAT, defeating chess grandmasters and debugging code like it’s nothing. But put an AI up against some middle schoolers at the spelling bee, and it’ll get knocked out faster than you can say diffusion.

For all the advancements we’ve seen in AI, it still can’t spell. If you ask text-to-image generators like DALL-E to create a menu for a Mexican restaurant, you might spot some appetizing items like “taao,” “burto” and “enchida” amid a sea of other gibberish.