Ursula K. LeGuin once wrote, “There is no right answer to the wrong question.” And while AI might struggle to understand the quip, we human readers get the point immediately. To solve a problem, you have to focus on what really matters about it.

That’s a big problem with the ongoing debate, most recently joined by Professor Nicholas Creel, over whether artificial intelligence models “learn” the same way as humans.

The simple answer, spelled out well in Erik J. Larson’s book “The Myth of Artificial Intelligence,” is that they don’t. They can’t handle or generate novelty, they become stymied when forced to operate with uncertainty or incomplete information, and they lack empathy and any real conception of understanding. They can copy and exploit almost infinite........

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