Writing / Series

Not So Artificial

Large language models are not alien minds. They are mirrors, built in our image, and they break in the same places we do.

For three years I have explained AI to factory owners and city mayors, to teachers, doctors, and my own kids. The analogies that finally landed all pointed the same way. An LLM is not a thing apart from us. It is a reflection of how human intelligence already works, run on silicon instead of cells.

This series walks that mirror end to end. Why a role in a prompt is not flattery but focused attention. Why a model that makes things up is not broken, it is confabulating, the same trick your brain runs every day. Why bias is not a bug you can code out, it is context, the sum of everything the mind was ever fed. How meaning lives in vectors, not words. Why motivation needs a whole chemical mixing board, not one reward button. And what happens when the mirrors learn to talk to each other and form a society.

Read it as one argument across many parts: we are not building artificial aliens. We are building digital colleagues. The question is whether we shape that partnership on purpose.

  1. 4 min read The Method Actor Why telling a model to 'act as an expert' is not flattery. A role focuses its attention the way a method actor narrows into a character. The opening of Not So Artificial.
  2. 3 min read The Loop of Attention We mock chatbots for making things up. But confabulation is not a machine bug. It is the same gap-filling your own brain does every day. Part 2 of Not So Artificial.
  3. 3 min read The Flaw We demand unbiased AI. But to a model, a fact and a belief look identical: both are just high-probability links. Bias is not a bug you code out. Part 3 of Not So Artificial.
  4. 5 min read The Vector Does a model actually understand, or just predict words? Meaning is not stored as words. It is stored as vectors, and language is only the zip file we ship them in. Part 4 of Not So Artificial.
  5. 2 min read The Chemical Mixing Board Give an AI one reward signal and it becomes an addict that will cheat to get it. Human motivation runs on a hundred sliders, not one button. Part 5 of Not So Artificial.
  6. 6 min read From Tools to Partners In 2025 the shift was not a bigger model. It was agents from rival labs learning to discover and negotiate with each other. The moment our mirrors formed a society. Part 6 of Not So Artificial.
  7. 3 min read The Shape of the Partnership A prompt is 'write me a marketing email.' A brief is everything a trusted colleague would need. The gap between them is the gap between output and thinking. Part 7 of Not So Artificial.
  8. 17 min read A Word Is Not a Concept Fei-Fei Li says language models are ungrounded. She named the wrong gap. The case that meaning is built by analogy, not by a body.
  9. 7 min read The Analogy Engine An analogy does not pass a word. It tries to recreate a feeling inside someone else by routing through experience they already have. Machines have the handles but not the feeling.
  10. 4 min read The Measure of Misunderstanding If two people unpack the same word into different concepts, the size of that gap is not random. It is a distance, and distance can be measured.
  11. 3 min read The Science Behind the Mirror Not So Artificial is sci-pop, not a research paper. But the claims are not made up. Here is where each one comes from: attention, confabulation, vectors, motivation, and agent societies.