Dr. Melanie Mitchell invites listeners to look past AI’s fluency and see its limits—systems that sound confident but don’t truly understand what they’re saying. She traces how today’s tools display “jagged intelligence,” performing brilliantly one moment and failing in surprisingly simple ways the next, from hallucinated facts to basic reasoning errors.
Mitchell warns that the real danger isn’t just mistakes, but our growing trust in machines that mimic human thinking without possessing it. She argues that despite rapid progress, AI still lacks common sense, self-awareness, and a grounding in the real world—qualities even a child begins to develop.
