Don't treat surface-level AI metaphors as if they describe fundamental reality
A frustration I regularly have in debates about AI is when people act as if the words we use about it are getting at fundamental categories of reality itself, even when they’re clearly especially imperfect, pragmatic metaphors we use to predict our human-scale world. In these moments I kind of want to grab the other person and announce to them that the concepts we use to think about the world in general are just very imperfect social conventions we use to try our best to find these basic but fallible patterns in the incomprehensible complexity lurking beyond our perception. This just assumes away the possibility that AI could do things the user doesn’t want, or that the designer didn’t expect and had no way of foreseeing.
- ▪A frustration I regularly have in debates about AI is when people act as if the words we use about it are getting at fundamental categories of reality itself, even when they’re clearly especially imperfect, pragmatic metaphors we use to pre
- ▪In these moments I kind of want to grab the other person and announce to them that the concepts we use to think about the world in general are just very imperfect social conventions we use to try our best to find these basic but fallible pa
- ▪This just assumes away the possibility that AI could do things the user doesn’t want, or that the designer didn’t expect and had no way of foreseeing.
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| Original publisher | Hacker News (AI / LLM) |
| Canonical URL | https://blog.andymasley.com/p/dont-treat-surface-level-metaphors |
| Publication time | Sat, 19 Sep 2026 11:59:44 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-19T12:08:45.710Z |
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Artificial IntelligenceDon’t treat surface-level metaphors about AI as if they describe fundamental realityDebates about whether AI is a “tool” or whether it’s wrong to “anthropomorphize” it often seem confused about what reality is made ofAndy MasleySep 19, 202637118ShareA privilege of being a physics major is learning just how strange fundamental reality is compared to the concepts we developed to make sense of it. As far as we know, all the stuff we’ve ever run into or interacted with can ultimately be written out like this:In a more legible form (already an imperfect metaphor), this says that all ordinary matter is some combination of these particles (which are really ripples in underlying fields), acting on each other through fundamental forces:If you put them together in juuuust the…
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