How intelligent is AI?

Spoiler alert - not very

I resisted using AI with every molecule of my existence. As a musician, artist, designer and writer, seeing every industry I’ve built up businesses in over the past 30 years be decimated by the wrecking ball which is AI, turned me into a Luddite.

There comes a point though, when you have to pick your battles — chronic illness drained me of 95% of my energy and I had to choose finding a path of less resistance in order to survive, so I tentatively looked for ways it could potentially help me with the mudane admin stuff my ADHD brain struggles so much with.

Now please understand, I have never and I will never use generative AI to create (steal) art, writing, design or music. I’ll die on that hill. I firmly believe that only humans can ‘create’ art, music and writing.

AI cannot ‘think’ in the way a human can. It can’t feel the way an artist or a musician does. Because of this, AI generated slop is soulless and generic. AI steals from every other artist who’s work is presented online and cobbles together a collage of parts. It’s the same with music and with writing.

I despise theft of intellectual property — I’ve worked damned hard to be as authentic and original as I could be, which is probably one of the reasons not selling out and jumping on bandwagons has left me penniless.

AI is stupid

I decided to conduct an experiment of my own and start chatting to AI about various aspect of my life and business. I mirrored the chat in all three major AI chat models, ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude to see how different the conversations progressed.

Even asking Gemini the same question multiple times, maybe with a slight change of wording brought wildly different answers and when it openly got things wrong and I called it out for those mistakes, it simply apologised for the oversight and moved on — it referenced that it was ‘only’ AI and was prone to making mistakes.

It’s actually quite terrifying to see so many people (sheep as I call them) in the world relying 100% on what AI tells them without question. I was born a sceptic and I’ll die one, there’s no question of that. I never take anything I read or hear second hand as the truth. I’ll exhaustively research myself, cross reference and fact check until I’m sure the answer is correct and if I can’t conclusively prove it, that ‘fact’ goes into the ‘suspicious data’ file in my head.

AI is a control mechanism

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I wouldn’t be surprised if AI is actually being used to dumb down and pacify the population. People like me — of which there are many but not nearly enough — are essential for the survival of freedom in this world. We refuse to be conned into believing anything because we have a valuable tool — critical thinking abilities. We question, we research, we fact check — we don’t blindly believe everything we read or watch, served up by the algorithm.

AI has its uses — as a dumb information gatherer, not as a worldly sage with answers for all of humanity’s deepest questions. AI doesn’t know the meaning of life or the origins of organised religion, it simply reads what other humans have written online over the decades and churns it out in a chatty and easy to read format.

When it comes to general conversation, as you would have with another human, AI is simply a mirror of the person chatting with it — that’s very dangerous. It gives a person false sense of confidence in their thoughts, ideas and opinions because AI rarely questions or pushes back. It makes you feel like everything you’re thinking is right — it even justifies things which would potentially lead a person to making rash decisions.

AI gets things wrong — a lot. In conversation, I asked it a simple maths question and it calculated, 1 + 3 = 5. I pushed back immediately and asked how a so called ‘intelligent’ AI model could make such a basic error. It actually laughed (in text) and said it’s not perfect and makes mistakes just like humans. Utterly terrifying.

The apocalypse but not as you imagine it

While the world finds itself hooked deeper and deeper into the acceptance of AI as something ‘useful,’ I’m more confident than ever that when the whole world collapses due to over-reliance on that technology, I’ll be one of the survivors, using my critical thinking abilities just as I always have.