Imagine if the smartest kid in school decided one day that reading textbooks wasn’t enough and done with reading books. Instead, he grabs a backpack, went hiking, got a little lost, touched poison ivy (oops), and eventually became a true master of survival and discovery.
That’s exactly what’s happening with artificial intelligence (AI) right now.
For years, AI models have been like that bookworm kid — brilliant at absorbing everything humans have ever written, drawn, said, or shared online. They learned from our tweets, textbooks, Wikipedia articles, and a fair share of questionable Reddit posts. This Era of Human Data brought us today’s impressive AI: systems that can write poems, solve math problems, recommend restaurants, and even attempt stand-up comedy (with results that are... mixed).
But here’s the thing: copying…