Duck AI!

AI or more precisely: LLM-based GenAI is still the hype of the hour — I can't wait for both of it to die. When cycling back home after wasting half a day at the office^[1], I had to think about the duck test. A quote from the Internet:

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. — Wikipedia

Unless that duck is generated by AI

Let's say you use AI to generate a piece of communication: An email. The result might have all the formal parts of an email and it might look like an email and it might even read like an email, but it will never be an email.

Communication is something creative, creating something new, something, that hasn't existed before, something unique. Ideally, it is written by a human being with a history, with emotions and an intention in mind, knowing the recipient, caring, using their skills, and their time. Creating is hard and takes effort but it is worth it despite that — or exactly because of that?

An LLM doesn't give a shit, they don't care — just like capitalism and billionaires. LLMs cannot be creative due to the mere fact that they don't create something new. They copy and mix the data they were trained with, and make the generated result look like something new. But just because it looks like it duck and reads like a duck, it is not a duck.