Overheard a guy at a coffee shop talking about how AI is just 'fancy autocorrect'

So I was grabbing a latte downtown last Thursday and this guy at the next table was explaining to his friend how all these AI chatbots are just super advanced predictive text. He said something like 'it's just guessing the next word really fast, nothing smart happening.' It got me thinking because I've been using one of those AI writing tools for my blog for a few months now. I mean he's kind of right about the core tech but I feel like the way it organizes information or generates new ideas feels more than just word guessing to me. Like I gave it a bunch of old posts I wrote and it spotted patterns in my writing style I never noticed. Has anyone else run into people totally dismissing what these models can actually do?

2 comments

2 Comments

wade_hall1mo ago

Heard something similar at a car wash last month. Some guy was telling his buddy these AI tools are basically just fancy parrots that repeat what they've seen online. I tried to jump in but he just kept going on about how there's no real understanding happening. Look, I get the technical argument but when I fed my old journal entries into one of those tools to help organize my thoughts, it actually found connections between stuff I wrote years apart. That's not just guessing words. Parrots don't figure out patterns across time like that. People really underestimate how much these things can piece together.

coleman.jade1mo ago

Used to think the same way honestly. I was real skeptical until I had a personal project where I fed in a bunch of old journal entries and it flagged a recurring theme about anxiety I'd been writing around for years without noticing. That felt way more like insight than just fancy typing. @wade_hall that journal connection you mentioned is exactly the kind of thing that made me change my tune too.