Uniquely Human: What Can AI Never Do?
Large language models (LLMs) are trained on massive amounts of text. Novels, textbooks, and poems alike teach models a broad range of concepts and skills, helping explain their impressive capabilities. Many people stop there and conclude, "AI cannot learn anything new; it can only repeat back what we teach it." This sounds correct, but it does not hold up in training theory or in practice. LLMs are not limited to verbatim repetition. Like humans, they learn abstract patterns and can recombine concepts across domains. They can produce outputs that are novel, useful, and often beyond what any individual human explicitly taught them.
