In New Experiment, Young Children Destroy AI at Basic Tasks

A recent study found that human children absolutely crush AI tools in basic problem-solving and thinking tasks, with scientists determining that AI has one serious blind spot: innovation. The study, conducted by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, provides a fascinating glimpse into the ability — or lack thereof — of currently available large language model (LLM) programs to produce truly novel ideas. Trained on countless gigabytes of human-created data, AI tools are incredibly good at predictive, statistics-centered tasks. After all, AI isn’t human, but it’s tasked with imitating them, and imitation inherently contradicts truly fresh, imaginative, and inventive thinking. But while this talent for copycatting and pattern-finding makes AI programs good at certain tasks, it apparently makes them really bad at others that are extremely rudimentary. Human children, on the other hand? Unlike the AIs, their innovative problem-solving skills were spot on — suggesting that there’s a bit more to human comprehension and reasoning than the mass-guzzling of internet-scraped data can replicate (at least for now, AI boosters might argue). The study focused heavily on tool use, particularly tool innovation, as a means to test problem-solving skills in its subjects. Tool innovation, as the researchers put it, “can involve designing new tools from scratch, but it can also refer to discovering and using old tools in new ways to solve novel problems.” In other words, the ability to innovate doesn’t just mean inventing a new object, like a lightbulb…In New Experiment, Young Children Destroy AI at Basic Tasks

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *