But with AI models, this approach rarely works, and the urge to ask reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what these systems are and how they operate.

Okay, this explanation might work for the masses, but never assume a person is an ignorant based on their behaviour. Never. Some people know it and don’t give it a fuck.

Example of that later.

What you’re actually doing is guiding a statistical text generator to produce outputs based on your prompts.

Right… go on.

Once an AI language model is trained (which is a laborious, energy-intensive process), its foundational “knowledge” about the world is baked into its neural network

Here’s the example. By the quotation marks, odds are the author knows that those models do not have world knowledge strictu sensu. But they’re still using the idiotic analogy. Why?

A: can’t be arsed to not use it, it’s misleading but easier than to find some idiot-friendly way to convey the same thing.