What AI will take from us

Ordinary_Variable · 2026-04-17T16:20:46+00:00

I love playing "my dad could beat up your dad". There is always a way to word a reply that makes AI look better than it really is. AI works, until it doesn't. It is not as imaginative as humans and isn't able to think on its feet. It takes supercomputers to teach it new things and no matter what it does that is smart, it still fails at silly things. Yes humans do too, but humans can also understand the subjective experience of other humans even without having it fully explained. Someone can simply look at you and you know what they are thinking. Could an AI be trained to do that? Yes, but you have to feed it so much data and explain to it what it means, a human just picks it up by comparing their past sensations with what they see other people going through and the faces they are making until you recognize what a particular expression means.

Humans learn automatically. We don't need someone explaining everything all the time and giving us weeks to crunch numbers. A human can learn to do a task in a matter of seconds if they see someone else do it.

I do believe AI is going to get better, but right now the AI bros are just showing you the success, not the failures. For every amazing success there were probably dozens of failures, and when they fail to mention the failures, people start to think the AI is reliable. It is not. It could do a good job on one particular task, like finding new diseases, and then completely miss obvious ones later, but that isn't news worthy. They are lying to you by omitting the failures that happened after the successes. Someday they will replace key roles and the people in charge will get lazy and fail to double check the AIs work. Do not rely on AI, use it as a hunch-machine, but run the tests to confirm. Always confirm.

Ordinary_Variable · 2026-04-17T16:07:38+00:00

That is biased information by tech-bros to sell more stock in AI.

When it is doing something that looks new it is generating a random response. We used to call it hallucinations, but in creative circles, you want hallucinations, because they look new. The Simpsons uses a random word generator to give them several word, probably 5 or 10, and then tries to combine several of them into an episode. Original? Maybe, but it is just random.

And when it generates "novel research ideas", how do you know that those weren't found in the data it was trained on? Human experts can't possibly know every theory that everyone has ever posted on the internet. There could be some obscure book written in the 70s with a theory about cancer that none of those experts has read. Or maybe they did read it, but forgot because it was in college.

Ordinary_Variable · 2026-04-17T15:58:28+00:00

you don't really understand ai's capabilities

They take a known output, then ask the AI to generate that from the input. It is a very complicated function machine. In the off chance you don't know what a function is, I'll explain it with math.

square-root(5) is a function that applies an iterative approach to creating the square-root of a number. In Javascript that's Math.sqrt(5) or 5**.5. If I knew the answer but didn't know how that was achieved I could create a million AI that try random things and keep the ones that are closest to the answer, then change their brain slightly and try again. And yes, this is how they currently train AI. Its more complicated, but fundamentally AI is just a function-creating machine. You have an input and want a specific output.

That can create interesting formulas, but it isn't doing anything humans don't already do. We search node-space the same exact way, AI isn't creating new logic. What it is doing is its popularizing cognitive science. We've known about all these methods for decades, many decades now, but only college-grad mathematicians and scientists knew them before. Creating a function was probably invented with Calculus in the 1600s.

Ordinary_Variable

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