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AI is not Google: you are the answer machine
'If you use AI in a stupid way, you become stupider. If you use it in a smart way, you become smarter.' I say this in almost every workshop, and usually people laugh. Then it goes quiet, because everyone recognises themselves in the first half of that sentence.
The search engine habit
Most people have been trained by search engines for twenty years. You type a question, you get an answer, you move on. It makes sense that we use AI in the same way. The window looks like that too: a box, a question, an answer.
But a language model is not a search engine. It does not look up an existing answer. It predicts, word after word, what should probably follow your question. Usually, that is surprisingly accurate. Sometimes it is not. And then you get something that sounds like an answer, with quotes that were never said, numbers that come from nowhere and a tone that is completely convinced of itself.
That is called hallucinating, and it is not a bug that will be fixed next month. It is part of how this technology works.
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