When AI goes haywire: the case of the skyscraper and the sliding trombone

Artificial intelligence (AI) is now part of our everyday lives. It is perceived as “intelligence” and yet is fundamentally based on statistics. Its results are based on previously learned patterns in data. As soon as we move away from the material we have learned, we are confronted with the fact that there is not much intelligent about it. A simple question like “Draw me a skyscraper and a sliding trombone side by side so I can see their respective sizes” yields something like this (this image was created by Gemini):

This example was generated by Google’s Gemini model, but generative AI dates back to the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 and is actually…