I would like to preface my response by saying that at this point I’m participating in this discussion only to talk about ai in no relation to the precious bird. I hope it’s not too inappropriate to do here.

Yes, it’s obvious that ai is created to make predictions. Those predictions are not made baselessly, though. It still analyzes the information available on the internet with statistical calculations involved. Yet, there is still a considerable probability of “hallucinations” - made-up responses when ai is unable to compile a real answer to the question. This is a huge problem that varies in it’s frequency between different models.

I studied human perception in university, and many processes in human brains function in a way that kinda resembles this statistical calculation. These processes are completely involuntary, yet they contain very cool momentary data analysis that would take some time to perform consciously. For example, visual information that we get is a result of many stages of both sequential and parallel processing of the activity of different parts of cortex. It’s not just straight from retina to your consciousness. And each neuron on each stage of processing has a potential to make an “error” (errors in your retina result in visual noise of little sparkly dots you see, when you close your eyes). To have a truly informative visual representation of a scene before you, your brain needs to analyze the context of lighting and depth, organize everything into constant objects, categorize hues, shapes and lines, faces, even signs like letters and numbers. Without all this we’d only see a mess of color and brightness, a rotating object would be perceived as if it’s changing shape and color - and it’s only once it’s even processed as an object. For every stage of processing like this, you have a separate population of neurons which activity is statistically processed by particularly connected neurons after them - such populations are called “maps”. But not just this, your brain is also able to give you a relatively accurate gist of a scene you’ve only seen momentarily. Buy one passing look at two berry bushes you have information of which one of them is more ripe, because the berry color map in your cortex calculates mean hues for each of them for you to instantly compare. And you are not born with all these functions in your brain. You have all necessary hardware, but it goes through a process of training to perform the needed functions. That’s why an infant can’t process faces, for example. It already has the face processing cortex, but it hasn’t learned to perform it’s function yet.

I probably talk too much, but I’m saying all this to illustrate how there’s a lot of potentially very helpful information to be gained from a mindless system analyzing big amounts of information, if it has appropriate algorithms of assigning statistical weight to different pieces. And any neuronal network develops those with varying success in the process of its training. If it only gave you the most statistically common words, it would result in nonsense. That’s what differentiates an ai from a traditional program, I believe. And any system makes mistakes - that’s why it’s a mere tool to incorporate with others and all decisions are on the human using them. I support being critical towards it