Flawless and Useless: AI Answers That Miss the Obvious
I use AI all day, every day, for all my tasks, work and personal.
It helps me brainstorm and come up with new ideas, organise my thoughts and connect the dots that I didn’t connect — and I love that.
But sometimes it really misses the obvious, and we need to have awareness of that.
Let me show you what I mean:
AI Knew My History — But Missed What Was Right in Front of It
Some time ago I asked it,
“Chatty, what languages do I speak?”
My ChatGPT has all the memory functions turned on, so it should know.
And it said:
You speak English really, really well, a bit of Spanish and Italian, and you’re learning Latin.
Which is all true.
But anyone watching the video will notice that I have an accent in English.
I probably speak another language before that — but Chatty missed that altogether.
No human would have missed that.
When Generic Becomes the Problem
If you ask it a question about financials or tax, it doesn't usually take into account that we’re in May, almost end of financial year in Australia or beginning of financial year in New Zealand.
It just gives a generic answer, not being very aware of the time of year.
And imagine you’re helping a client build a website, and it suggests to set up the website with a testimonial section, but may miss altogether that this website is for a psychologist, and they are not allowed to show client testimonials on their websites.
A human building a website for a psychologist probably would know.
But Chatty just goes with the general.
Missing the Obvious
It can miss that the person asking it for a meal plan is a 12-year-old child, and not an adult.
It will miss if a question is sensitive to the time of year, to the season.
It will miss the very obvious.
It’s Not in the Room With Us
So as users, we need to keep awareness of that in our mind.
We need to remember that as much as it sounds like a human and is smart like a human — or even smarter — it can miss the very obvious.
It doesn't sit in the room with us.
It doesn't see the context that we’re seeing.
And so, we need to feed it that context, and to get used to thinking about that obvious, so that we inform it and get even better responses.
If you're not sure how to teach your team to use AI effectively and responsibly — reply to this email — I'm here to help.
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Inbal Rodnay
Guiding Firms in Adopting AI and Automation
Keynote speaker | AI Workshops | Executive briefings | Consulting CIO
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