“Current AI systems don’t really show up for any of that.”
Our reading:
Current AI systems do not really build cognitive models of the kind humans use to understand stories and the world.
Assessment: Can’t be checked
What happened
Not graded on evidence
Outcome: Can’t be checked
An opinion, a recommendation, or too vague to test. Listed, not scored.
Evidence up to . Checked .
Why
The surrounding passage invokes a broad collection of human cognitive activities. It does not say what would count as an AI system 'really' participating in them. Contemporary functional demonstrations are relevant, but treating limited story consistency or state tracking as a decisive contradiction would narrow the claim against the speaker. Treating the sentence as requiring human feelings would add a different unsupported criterion.
Caveats
- This is not a finding that then-current systems lacked every useful narrative capability.
- Individual capacities such as maintaining character relationships could be tested under separate, explicit criteria.
Evidence (1 item)
Claims like this aren’t scored, so there is no evidence to show.
How we judged it
- Kind of claim
- Observation
- Deadline
- None given. We don’t add one.
Where we had to interpret
- Read 'any of that' in its narrative and cognitive context: shared meaning, intentions, inference, emotional response, and internal models that inform choices.
- Preserve 'really'; do not substitute the narrower claim that no AI system can track any entities or states.
- The passage does not specify which combination of these capacities, or what depth of performance, would count as genuinely participating in the described human processes.
- Neither a toy state tracker nor the lack of human emotional experience supplies a fair test of the entire statement.
We don’t grade claims like this. We only check the quote and who said it.
What would settle it
A clarification identifying the cognitive functions and observable performance sufficient to count as 'showing up' for the described activities.
We found 33 claims in this post. See them all.
Full record
Source and dates
Marcus on AI, Three ideas from linguistics that everyone in AI should know, paragraph 29.
- Said
- We read the source
- live page, full text, public
- Evidence up to
- Checked
We read this wording on 2026-10-29. The post may have been edited after 2022-06-22.
Where it was said (1)
Said once in the posts we read.
: Marcus on AI, Three ideas from linguistics that everyone in AI should know
Current AI systems don’t really show up for any of that.
- Where
- paragraph 29
- Published
- 2022-06-22
- We read it
- , live page
- Access
- full text, public
History
Versions
- Current: Can’t be checked. Evidence up to 2026-10-28.
What happened to this record
PublishedBy us
Published after both AI reviews and the final check passed.
Held backBy us
A reviewer said our test wasn’t fair to what was actually said.