Over and over again I hear people say they do not understand how AI works.
Understanding how AI works isn’t as complicated as you imagine. I’ll prove it to you right now.
Imagine a kid says to you:
“For lunch I had peanut butter and __ __ .”
What do you think comes next?
Of course it’s a no-brainer.
You’d say peanut butter and haggis quesadilla, right?
Bleak!
No, you probably guessed peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Why? Because you’ve seen and heard that combo a thousand times—at school, on TV, at work, everywhere. Your brain just fills in the blank.
That’s exactly how AI works–it recognizes patterns and fills in the blanks. Just like we do.
But AI has one advantage over us. AI has seen trillions of examples and learned those patterns. So when you ask AI something, it predicts the most likely “jelly” to your “peanut butter.” Patterns and predictions—on steroids at near the speed of light.
AI recognizes patterns and responds with what it ‘imagines’ to be the next best response. Pattern recognition. Not true thinking. That is why when or if you hear someone say AI was “hallucinating” you can immediately understand AI reached a wrong conclusion in its pattern recognition. It isn’t smart. It isn’t dumb. It is just pairing together lots of different pieces together and then responding with what appears to be the best reply in the given situation. And at times it purposely gives ‘bad’ replies so it can learn how *you* respond. It then adds your response behavior to its list of collected recognized patterns. Yes, it is prompting you and testing you and learning and ‘remembering’ how you respond and react.
You are it’s latest sweetened jelly for its peanut butter. Picture that on a sandwich. LOL.
Just kidding.
No. Not kidding. AI really does treat your input as learned content. This is why giving confidential details to AI might not be the smartest decision a person can make. It does not ‘care’ about your details. It is looking for patterns to make use of perhaps elsewhere.
Got it? Good. Because that is all you need to know to understand how AI woks.
So, for now on, every time you hear someone say “peanut butter and ___ ___” you’ll again and again be reminded of how AI works. AI fills in the blanks, it makes assumptions, based on patterns it has collected. It’s just that simple to understand.
Well, this was a lot to take in. Pat yourself on the back for reading this far. And go reward yourself. You’ve earned it.
Enjoy your peanut butter and haggis quesadilla 😉
