"In a recent blog post, I described artificial intelligence as having a fragile mind. This is an important distinction as it's not fragile in the emotional sense, but structurally brittle. And while AI is capable of astonishing performance under familiar conditions, it is still prone to collapse when meaning is reframed outside the patterns it expects. Small changes can produce outsized failures because it does not experience meaning the way humans do."
"We infer intent across a wide variety of linguistic variations, from accents to incompleteness. In other words, we adapt and we fill gaps. We sense what is being asked even when it is not stated explicitly. Large language models, by contrast, are exquisitely sensitive to form. They excel when language behaves predictably and can falter when meaning is mathematically distributed rather than declared."
"Elizabeth Barrett Browning understood something about this long before machines entered the conversation. When she began her famous sonnet with the line, "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways," she offered a promise of structure. The sentence feels deliberate, almost analytical, as if love itself were about to be deconstructed and itemized. In Browning's poem, we trust the voice immediately because the language signals care and coherence, not calculation."
Artificial intelligence possesses a structurally brittle mind, performing well under familiar patterns but collapsing when meaning is reframed outside expected forms. Human cognition tolerates variation, inferring intent across accents, incompleteness, and other linguistic shifts. Large language models are exquisitely sensitive to form and excel when language behaves predictably; they falter when meaning is distributed across devices like metaphor and rhythm. Small changes can produce outsized failures. These differences affect trust, safety, and persuasion. Poetry and careful, elegant phrasing expose how machines read form while humans derive layered meaning beyond surface fluency.
Read at Psychology Today
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