AI may stand for “Artificial Intelligence,” but plenty of us are still waiting to see solid evidence of the “intelligence” part. As someone who uses it occasionally, I can confirm: the glitches are real. It still can’t always seem to accept that Trump is the current president, a lot of the AI chatbots are behind on the news, and some of the AI-generated recipes I’ve tried have been… experimental.
Is AI actually intelligent? Short answer: Not really. Longer answer: Not unless your definition of “intelligent” includes confidently spitting out wrong answers with the swagger of a left-wing cable news pundit.
Sure, AI is faster than Google, but speed isn’t accuracy. Garbage in, garbage out. These systems are only as reliable as the data they’re trained on – and you really have no idea where AI is getting its information unless you specifically ask it to cite its sources.
So use AI, but don’t bet your news, your sanity, or your dinner on it.
Still, the “experts” keep insisting AI is about to steal every job in America and take over the world. Maybe someday – but at the rate it’s going, that apocalypse is running behind schedule. And let’s not forget: AI can’t exist without the human-generated sources it feeds on. Unless we’re ready for computers to become the sole keepers and distributors of all facts, we’re not replacing people anytime soon. And we never should.
AI doesn’t think. It predicts patterns. AI doesn’t actually “look up” answers – it predicts them. When you ask a question, your words are converted into data the model compares to patterns it learned during training from tons of text. It doesn’t think, fact-check, or browse the internet; it simply guesses the most likely next word, over and over, until a full response forms. That’s why AI can sound smart, creative, or fast, but can also be confidently wrong. In the end, it’s basically supercharged autocomplete, shaped by the patterns it’s seen – not real intelligence.
Or as X’s Grok puts it: “When you ask an AI a question, your words are first chopped into small pieces called tokens (like tiny puzzle pieces of text). The AI turns each piece into a long string of numbers that represent its meaning. Then, using a super-smart system called a transformer, it looks at all your words at once and figures out how they connect to each other, kind of like instantly understanding the whole sentence. After that, it starts writing the answer one tiny piece at a time, always guessing the most likely next word based on everything it has ever learned from billions of pages of text. It keeps going like this until the answer is complete, then turns those pieces back into normal words for you to read. That’s it: no real thinking or understanding like a human – just really fast, really good pattern-matching with math!”