Things Humans Still Do Better Than AI: Understanding Flowers

While it might feel as though artificial intelligence is getting dangerously smart, there are still some basic concepts that AI doesn’t comprehend as well as humans do. Back in March, we reported that popular large language models (LLMs) struggle to tell time and interpret calendars. Now, a study published earlier this week in Nature Human Behaviour reveals that AI tools like ChatGPT are also incapable of understanding familiar concepts, such as flowers, as well as humans do. According to the paper, accurately representing physical concepts is challenging for machine learning trained solely on text and sometimes images. “A large language model can’t smell a rose, touch the petals of a daisy or walk through a field of wildflowers,” Qihui Xu, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher in psychology at Ohio State University, said in a university statement. “Without those sensory and motor experiences, it can’t truly represent what a flower is in all its richness. The same is ... Read full article.