Artificial intelligence often looks more mysterious than it is.

You type: “Summarise this report.” “Find the cheapest suitable flight.” “Review these documents and tell me what is unusual.”

Or, increasingly: “Plan the next five steps and execute them.”

The system reads, processes, searches, compares, generates and sometimes acts. That leap can make AI seem autonomous, but a first-principles view is simpler:

AI has a form; humans give it direction; training shapes capability; humans ultimately decide what its actions mean.

AI is, usefully, an “artificial brain” trained on human data—historically text, increasingly images, sound, video, code and sensor information.

The Qur’an gives us two useful concepts here.

Allah records Mūsā عليه السلام saying: “Our Lord is the One Who has given everything its distinctive form, then guided it.” — Qur’an 20:50.

Ibn Kathīr رحمه الله records early explanations: Mujāhid understood Allah as giving each creature its form; Saʿīd ibn Jubayr said each was given what suited its creation; reports from Ibn ʿAbbās رضي الله عنهما similarly emphasise distinct forms and kinds.

The theological verse, abstracted carefully, suggests: form determines capability; direction determines use.

A bird has wings, a fish fins, a falcon speed, vision and flight, a dog smell, pursuit and responsiveness. Capability alone cannot answer its proper end; that question sits at AI’s centre. A trained dog handler or a falcon handler – be it for hunting, sniffing out drugs or any other productive use is effectively “prompting” the agent – the animal in this case, just as we prompt an AI model. 

Type, “Explain why this company’s sales fell.”

The machine receives language, not intention: numerical tokens processed by an architecture whose trained parameters ask what is relevant, related, requested and useful. It generates piece by piece, each output becoming context for the next.

Hence “next-token predictor”: accurate but potentially misleading, because prediction across medicine, law, programming, economics, literature and conversation requires learning grammar, conceptual relationships, styles, arguments, code patterns, facts, causal regularities and reasoning patterns.

The output mechanism is simple to describe; the learned structure is not. Training over vast examples repeatedly adjusts parameters: architecture provides potential; training develops practical capability.

This is where a second Qur’anic image helps: “They ask you what is lawful for them. Say, ‘Lawful for you are all good things, and what is caught by your hunting animals and birds of prey which you have trained as instructed by Allah. So eat what they catch for you…’” — Qur’an 5:4.

Ibn Kathīr رحمه الله discusses trained hunters including dogs and falcons. It is hunting law, not machine learning, but the analogy is useful: humans do not give a falcon wings; they train and direct its existing biological capability. Capability is one thing; directed capability another. A modern AI may have architecture, weights, memory, context, tools, vision, speech or robotic control; the prompt supplies direction: “Summarise this” means compression, “Identify contradictions” comparison, “Generate code that performs this function” construction. Tell an agent, “Find me a suitable hotel below £200 and return the best three,” and it may search, compare and filter; “Book the best one if all these conditions are met,” authorises action. It did not decide you needed a hotel; the goal came from a human. An agent receives an objective, plans, uses tools, observes, revises and continues. As autonomy grows, direction matters more. A falcon can fly the wrong way, a dog chase endangered wildlife, and AI optimise the wrong objective.

Tell it “Maximise engagement,” and outrage, fear and anger may keep people online. If engagement alone matters, it has no inherent reason to say, “This may damage society, therefore I should stop.” That judgment must come from human values, law, safety training, institutional governance, culture or religion. Capability does not produce a universally valid moral compass. Humans shape behaviour explicitly through rules, feedback, objectives and safety mechanisms, and implicitly through training data.

Training AI is not merely giving it “data”; it is feeding it fragments of human civilisation:........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)