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Lesson 1 of 8 · 6 min
What Is Actually Happening
An AI chatbot is a prediction machine, not a know-it-all.
Big idea: AI writes the words that most plausibly come next — plausible is usually true, but not always.
Card 1 of 4
It predicts, it doesn't look things up
When you ask a chatbot a question, it isn't fetching an answer from a library shelf. It is predicting text, a chunk at a time, based on patterns in the enormous pile of writing it was trained on. It produces the words that most plausibly follow your question. Most of the time, plausible and true are the same thing. That is exactly why the times they aren't are so easy to miss.
Think of the world's most well-read autocomplete, running at high speed and full confidence.