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Frédéric Prost, Maître de conférences en informatique, INSA Lyon – Université de Lyon

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

AI-generated images, in response to the prompt: “Draw me a skyscraper and a sliding trombone side-by-side so that I can appreciate their respective sizes” (left by ChatGPT, right by Gemini) CC BY

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now part of our everyday life. It is perceived as “intelligence” and yet relies fundamentally on statistics. Its results are based on previously learned patterns in data. As soon as we move away from the subject matter it has learned, we’re faced with the fact that there isn’t much that is intelligent about it. A simple question, such as “Draw me a skyscraper and a sliding trombone side-by-side so that I can appreciate their respective sizes” will give you something like this (this image has been generated by Gemini):

This example was generated by Google’s model, Gemini, but generative AI dates back to the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 and is in fact only three years old. The technology has changed the world and is unprecedented in its adoption rate. Currently, 800 million users rely on ChatGPT every week to complete various tasks, according to OpenAI. Note that the number of requests tanks during the school holidays. Even though it’s hard to get hold of precise figures, this goes to show how widespread AI usage has become. Around one in two students regularly uses AI.

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