Two years ago, I wrote an article on the above logical puzzle about correctly labelling the three boxes containing apples, oranges, and a mix of apples and oranges.
To this day, it has been read over 100k times and sparked over 200 dialogues in the comment section.
In the same period of time, numerous AI LLMs have gone through dozens of quarterly, monthly, or even weekly iterations. So I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see how Open AI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot fare when posed this brain teaser.
Of course, if this is your first time coming across this puzzle, I encourage you to think it through before reading on.
Never waste a precious opportunity to engage with your brain muscles.
ChatGPT’s Solution
Gemini’s Solution
Copilot’s Solution
I suppose all of these LLMs have been trained on data that includes exactly this puzzle, but even if not, I am sure they will have figured it out anyway.
Somehow it’s not as fun to read through the solutions presented by them compared to reading the solution I wrote in the original blog post.
Let me paste that here for you.
If we treat the communication effectiveness as a ratio of information conveyed over word count, all of these AI agents win by a landslide, but I know from my heart that people would derive more joy reading the exact same puzzle from a blog like mine over getting the arguably cleaner answers from the chatbot. It’s perhaps the use of the different images and elements from Canva, the colors of the bright red apples and succulent oranges, or simply the fact that the readers know the post comes from a real human.
That last bit is something that AI can never replace. I am the human writer behind the article, a conduit with a beating soul through which the little sparks of intellectual enlightenment are distilled to our minds.
I think that’s it. There’s more and deeper intrinsic value in the human pursuit of anything, which can also be done by AI, even when AI sometimes does it more efficiently.
Think of your local Starbucks as an example, it won’t be long before we have our cold-brew pumpkin spice latte served by barista-like humanoids some day. These soulless entities are less prone to error and failure, and are probably more cost-effective from the company’s point of view. This would also eradicate the occasional conflicts between customers and baristas.
But at what cost? Well I think the cost is immeasurable. All the human to human interactions, the small talk, the greetings, the smiles, whether performative or authentic, all contribute to the release of the various feel good hormones that have sustained the human race for millennia.
That’s why Starbucks’ ingenuity lies in having the customers’ name written on the coffee cup. People like hearing other people say their names. It’s the strongest and loveliest language one can ever utter, at least according to ‘How To Win Friends and Influence People’ by Dale Carnegie.
I will be honest, I have used multiple AI tools to help with my writing and image generation. But I know I write the best when the writing comes from my heart, when it touches on topics that I genuinely care about. It always flows different and it’s as if an invisible potent internal monologue is guiding my fingertips to the specific keys on my keyboard.
So while it’s important to go with the flow of the ever-evolving era of artificial intelligence, that is to say, we should be learning to use these tools available at our fingertips, we should never forget we as a human race have done just fine before any of this.
Let’s cherish what makes us human whenever we can because life goes beyond fabricated intelligence, it’s a series of tiny moments of day-to-day human interactions, filled with real and raw emotions.
I hope you enjoyed this section of writing, which is 100% Barry-written.
Thank you 🙂
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