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How a parrot on a flag reveals why AI exists [1]

['Ellsworth Toohey']

Date: 2025-08-08

"What animal is featured on a flag of a country where the first small British colony was established in the same year that Sweden's King Gustav IV Adolf declared war on France?"

Rakhim Davletkali asked Google this question and he says it "failed miserably… Unless someone wrote an article about that exact thing, a plain full-text search engine cannot answer a question like this."

But ChatGPT "got the correct answer in a few seconds" — the Sisserou parrot, which appears on Dominica's flag.

The test results, he argues, reveal that AI exists because we humans are terrible at organizing our digital world.

Remember the dream of a "Semantic Web" where all online information would be neatly structured and machine-readable? Instead, we got a chaos of JavaScript-driven websites and messy data. Even basic tools like Google Drive offer worse file organization than 30-year-old desktop systems. Rather than fix these problems, we've embraced a "just search for it" mentality.

Enter AI as our digital janitor, making sense of our mess. It doesn't need carefully organized information — it creates instant connections across billions of scattered facts. But this solution comes at a cost. As the author notes, "If all knowledge were stored in a structured way with rich semantic linking, then very primitive natural language processing algorithms could parse questions… using orders of magnitude fewer computational resources."

"AI is not a triumph of elegant design, but a brute-force workaround," he says. "LLMs like ChatGPT can infer structure from chaos."

Previously:

• ChatGPT became such a sycophant even hardcore AI bros noticed

• ChatGPT confidently loses chess match to 1979 Atari game

• OpenAI's ChatGPT is a decent poet and Seinfeld show writer

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