AI - Artificial Intelligence 

                                  Opinions by Dick Caro

A great deal has been written about AI, most of it highly speculative and some written by persons who have not actually used AI. I have used AI frequently to look up information, much as I have used browser-based search tools in the past. I am greatly pleased at the ability of AI to gather appropriate information and moreover to present it in a very professional format. If I choose to use the AI-supplied information, I generally credit the AI source rather than claim it to be my own research. I call this the “ethical use of AI.”

The future of AI has been forecast as though the AI tool was truly “intelligent” - it is NOT. While AI is very capable of researching and presenting information, it can only do so for data on which it was “trained.” Generally, the training source is the Internet, a wide assortment of information, but occasionally false. Currently there is no way for false information to be culled from an AI training source. One of the oldest expressions of computing is “Garbage in, Garbage out.” Current versions of AI can be found on the Internet supplied by Google, Microsoft, xAI, and ChatGBT. Each warns of the fact that searches using their AI package may produce false results, but none of them provide a way to validate their response to the user’s question or request. Users must be careful to not ask their AI software to predict future occurrences since they were trained only on past results.

AI software has proven highly useful and the format of the results is so amazing that there is a tendency to forget that the results are only a grammatically correct formatted presentation of information from the Internet on which the AI was trained. There is no hidden creative or intuitive intelligence behind the results. AI is just a wondrous version of a browser using the Internet or the subject matter on which it was trained as the source of data.

Many of the public, commercial, or financial publications or advertisements assume that the use of AI indicates future use for creative uses as though there was a sentient being behind the AI. This is stimulated by the use of AI to create works of art, poetry, or literature that seem to be “creative.” Today’s AI is not sentient. Any original creations originating from AI are strongly rooted in the directions of the person requesting the finding, and the material on which it was trained. For example, a request for an AI software trained on great works of art can produce an original work of art in the manner of van Gogh depicting a ship at sea. However, the ship might be a modern aircraft carrier, requiring a more correct request for a 19th century sailing vessel at sea. Again, a calm sea would not be a good example of the art of van Gogh, so a modified request would request a sea during a storm. You will get what you ask for since there is no sentient being within AI.

Just like computer programming, AI will give you exactly what you have requested, subject to limits established by the AI package itself, or by the features specified in the original request. Rules established within the AI software may be hard and fast rules such as the restriction to NOT produce art depicting an unclothed human (even though paintings by Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio) and Peter Paul Rubens, paintings include nudes, may have been included in their training data), nor to plan events which would result in the taking of human life. It will become a human skill to use AI to produce works of art, literature, or computer programming just like it is today, but with the AI package doing most of the labor. An untrained person using AI will not be able to produce works of art, literature, or computer programs of value without their own training in these fields.

Let’s discuss AI becoming sentient. There are already software programs being used to converse with a human as part of on-line customer service or chat applications. Such computer applications are typically narrow in scope and are designed to gather basic facts before passing off service to a human technician. In some cases, the chat software can solve some problems directly such as sending a command to reboot a cable modem.

Sentience: possessing a human-like capability to reason, create, and imagine. Issac Asimov, the great science-fiction writer of the 20th century created the Three Laws of Robotics in his book I. Robot: 

1. A robot may not injure a human or, through inaction, allow a human to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey orders given to it by a human, except when such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

However, being sentient requires judgement or creative skills not previously experienced by using the training data.

There are problems with the use of AI, especially in a scholastic setting. While the encyclopedia and text books were the chosen reference materials during my education, today students typically use the Internet for their own research. I am sure that you recognize that AI is typically trained using the Internet as its primary data source. So, what is wrong with students using AI trained with the Internet as its data source? Nothing! AI is just another vehicle of automation that improves on the speed and scope of Internet searches - an improved search engine! Personally I have been greatly impressed with the ability of the AI options embedded in Google Chrome (Gemini) to produce dissertation-quality results for my queries. 

Another oft’mentioned problem use of AI is to improve the grammar and readability of written text, particularly in an academic setting such as term papers, thesis writing, and dissertations.  Hooray! This is a wonderful use of AI, and may I add the writing of newspaper and magazine articles as well. This article is being written using Google Docs, which offers grammar and spelling correction, as well. Microsoft Word also offers these features plus suggestions to clarify wording.

Current versions of AI can be found on the Internet supplied by Google, Microsoft, xAI, and ChatGBT. Each warns of the fact that searches using their AI package may produce false results, but none of them provide a way to validate their response to the user’s original question or request. Users must be careful to not ask their AI software to predict future occurrences since they were trained only on past results. AI software has proven highly useful and the format of the results is so amazing that there is a tendency to forget that the results are only a grammatically correct formatted presentation of information from the Internet on which the AI was trained. There is no hidden creative or intuitive intelligence behind the results. AI is just a wondrous version of a browser using the Internet or the subject matter on which it was trained as the source of data. Many of the public, commercial, or financial publications or advertisements assume that the use of AI indicates future use for creative uses as though there was a sentient being behind the AI. This is currently false! In 2026, AI cannot create something that has never existed before, but may excel in creative combinations of information on which it was trained in ways expressed by the user in their original query. 

Copyright by Richard Caro, 2026