Fuck AI

Sounding plausible is all they're trained for. The whole setup was designed to avoid wishy-washy "I don't know" responses. Which is great, if you want to ask what Lord Of The Rings would sound like if Eminem wrote it, but we're treating that improv exercise like a magic eight-ball.

The most frustrating part of it is seeing people expect something else. And I'm including commenters here. 'I told the word-guessing machine to stop guessing words, and it just guessed more words!' 'Why doesn't the text robot know which icons this program has?' Folks, hallucination is the a technical term, and it's the function that makes this work at all. Everything it does is hallucinated. Some of that happens to match reality. Reality tends to be plausible.

The problem in full is that it's shoved onto the public and presented as science fiction. As if Google submits your questions to the Answertron 5000 which spits out a little receipt printed in all-caps. But there's no good-old-fashioned if-then logic involved. It's algebra soup. We gave up trying to be clever and did whatever got results. Now you can ask for anything you want, and it's usually close enough.

You can also ask how tall the king of Madeupistan is, and it'll probably play along.

Playing along is how it works.