In a recent blog post, I described artificial intelligence as having a fragile mind. This is an important distinction as it's not fragile in the emotional sense, but structurally brittle. And while AI is capable of astonishing performance under familiar conditions, it is still prone to collapse when meaning is reframed outside the patterns it expects. Small changes can produce outsized failures because it does not experience meaning the way humans do.

Our human cognition is remarkably tolerant of variation. In fact, it may actually enhance communication itself. We infer intent across a wide variety of linguistic variations, from accents to incompleteness. In other words, we adapt and we fill gaps. We sense what is being asked even when it is not stated explicitly. Large language models, by contrast, are exquisitely sensitive to form. They excel when language behaves predictably and can falter when meaning is mathematically distributed rather than declared. This difference has consequences far beyond performance benchmarks. It shapes aspects of communication that include trust, safety, and even persuasion.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning understood something about this long before machines entered the conversation. When she began her famous sonnet with the line, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,” she offered a promise of structure. The sentence feels deliberate,........

© Psychology Today