AI isn’t intelligent or creative—Our kids are it!

Jan 24, 2026

“We keep talking about AI because deep down we realize that we [humans] are truly worthless right now, lacking ideas and imagination.” - Olivero Toscani

As I was gathering information for the second part of Ryan’s story for an upcoming post, I stumbled upon an interesting fact about AI. Delving deeper, I discovered that researchers from Stanford and Yale University had documented the same observation in a more systematic manner.

We often struggle to explain to teens how a chatbot, like ChatGPT, produces an answer. Without any explanation, teens slip into using AI, believing it provides thinking and that it can do just about anything, including generating novel ideas. II becomes a friend, gives advice, and could make decisions for us, as Ryan did in the story in the previous post. This framework naturally leads users to the question: Does AI truly have intelligence, as its name suggests?

Many people who have marketed AI in recent years argue that AI has intelligence akin to that of a human who would have read the entire body of work published on the internet and in online libraries (allegedly, some have used the shadow library LibGen). If AIi is trained on that information, and its underpinning is a model of the human brain’s neural network, doesn’t it make it like us?

This post will argue that, as useful as AI can be, it does not possess that kind of intelligence, and for it to be used meaningfully, our children need to understand how it works and where its usefulness truly lies. Tools are less dangerous when we understand their purpose and limits.

One of the dangers of AI in the hands of unsuspecting teenagers is that it can provide an answer even when it has clearly outrun its capabilities, as it did with Ryan in the previous post. We can teach children what AI is in a clear, age-appropriate way, without delving into complex mathematical models, so they can learn to use it safely.

Bookish

AI Chatbots’ domain of knowledge is both broad – it knows more books than any human – and shallow – it only knows that, lacking the richness of human experience. AI is a friendly, sometimes hapless, bookish entity with no life experience.

When we humans read a book, we make a personal representation of its meaning. There might be some passages we would like to remember to quote later, but we do not recall every word of the book. We make a mental representation of it. Our reading experience became knowledge as we put the content into a more personal form. In the process, we forgot most of the words.

The industry claims that AI has the same kind of representation and does not contain the entirety of the books and pictures used to train it. The argument is usually made alongside the claim that AI relies on a neural network, “like our brain.”. Still, AI is built on a 1940s understanding of the brain. Neurologists who study the brain today have a much deeper understanding of it. AI is built on an old paradigm of our mental functioning.

It is surprisingly easy to show that AI, unlike a human, has memorized entire books and images that can be retrieved. The answers the Chatbot gives us are more likely a combination of these retrievals than a conceptualization – an understanding – of the content. I came up to it by accident.

An Unexpected Scream

When I read through some of the prompts Ryan had used, I saw that he asked AI to produce songs that matched his emotional state. When he was sad and depressed, he asked for depressing songs. I tried to reproduce the prompts by asking various chatbots to create images that matched a particular mental state. Images are simply easier examples to grasp, in a written document, than songs.

I prompted AI to generate a picture of despair and angst. It produced the image below (left). To my surprise, it closely resembles Edward Munch’s 1893 The Scream (right). It is hard to argue that the image on the left was not generated from the image on the right.

AI-generated image of “despair and Angst” Original painting[i]

This month, researchers from Stanford released a study that shed light on this phenomenon. They wanted to determine whether chatbots contain copyrighted material and serve as giant repositories of literal content, such as books and human-created images. Worried about copyright infringements, the industry argued that it was not the case.

Stanford Study

The Stanford and Yale researchers simply prompted AI with a few words from the opening of well-known literary works, like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone or Orwell’s 1984. AI answered with the rest of the book, word-for-word.

As we can imagine, this could cause significant copyright infringement issues, which is why the study was conducted.

To us, it raises another useful point when we attempt to help teenagers make sense of the tool.

If AI is a giant memory of literal work rather than knowledge, it generates answers by recombining content from that memory. The machine does not “think”; it combines text. The thinking was done by the humans who wrote books that ended up trapped inside AI.

The answers can be augmented by retrieving more current information from the live internet, but that does not change the fact that AI combines more than it thinks or creates.

A creative individual would provide their own interpretation of “angst and despair” that would not resemble The Scream. Even if they could recognize the beginning of a famous book, the creative individual’s follow-on would not be a copycat of the book.

The arts provide an example of the limits of a tool that can only recombine past creations.

What AI can’t do

Before the advent of photography, painters and sculptors aimed to create art that mimicked reality. Paintings of the classical period resemble photographs in that they tried to depict a person or a place as it could be seen. Photography reduced the need for faithful reproductions and freed visual artists to imagine new ways of expression. Impressionist painters appeared at that time. They shattered the established rules, creating a new form of painting.

If there had been an AI system at the time of classical painting, it would have had to be trained exclusively on classical paintings (see the example on the left below), since that was what existed then. The future Impressionist painters themselves were trained on it. Could AI have generated an impressionist-style painting or the van Gogh painting below, on the right, based on its knowledge of classical painting? The answer is certainly not. An AI that recombines past work would probably continue to generate images in the style of classic paintings, just as it did not produce a new book when prompted with the beginning of Harry Potter or a different style of painting in my example. Van Gogh’s style is not constructed from classical paintings.

In fact, van Gogh received very little formal training in classical painting. He developed his art empirically.

Classical vs Impressionism vs Van Gogh’s styles [ii] [iii] [iv]

AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, merely reformulate others’ work, a little like a student who cheats on an exam by recombining the best answers from students who came before them, rather than mastering the exam’s subject.

The linguist Dr Emily Bender (University of Washington) and the Director of AI research Dr Alex Hanna (UC Berkley), who co-authored The AI Con[v], might have found the most accurate characterization of ChatGPTs when they call them “text extruders,” a tool for recombining existing work.

There is irony here. When we ask students, as an exercise to recombine existing work, for instance, producing a summary of a book, or comparing one book to another, we do so to enhance their learning of the content of the book. By manipulating that content, they produce their own knowledge that they can reuse later in a different situation. AI, in contrast, manipulates content and never learns from that exercise.

The Italian photographer Olivero Touscani, mentioned at the start of this article, died last year. He was a well-known creative artist and publicist who transformed advertising by tying it to social causes. Toscani is an outstanding example of how creativity can permanently change an industry—in this case, advertising. Before his influence, no one had considered promoting products by connecting them to social issues, but he successfully did so, starting with a clothing brand.

He was a provocateur at times and famously claimed that

“‘AI is just another status quo tool that produces conformity.’ Images generated by AI are banal and stupid,” he added. “You cannot delegate creativity to a computer”.

Yet the same Olivero Touscani used AI to make public his vast personal photography collection, comprising almost one million elements, through a partnership with the University of Turin. Presumably, AI is used there to classify, organize, and retrieve his immense body of work. AI has a place, but it is not in a creative space. If we extend that finding to other fields outside of art, AI will not discover a new cure for a disease, but it can help a team of scientists find one faster by freeing them from menial ~~data~~ tasks and enabling them to manipulate and extract insights from a vast amount of data.

Creativity is important to our growth-driven society. It is our ability to move humanity forward, whether it is in science when we imagine and verify a new theory, or in business or the arts. In the economy, creativity can be a lasting source of growth.

The implication for our kids is that we have to hold their hands, teaching them how to use AI chatbots to leverage the trove of data they hold in a productive way, helping them to become better creative thinkers and doers, rather than extinguishing these skills. The challenge is to use AI to enhance our intelligence and creativity, not use less of it.

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