AI Assistant Fields Questions From Senior Stakeholders

I wondered what would happen if Adam, the AI in this strip, showed up as the guest reader at a preschool. My guess is the kids would be running the room in under a minute.

The first question is whether he is a robot. He says he is a large language model, which is the accurate answer and the wrong one. The kid looks him up and down and tells him he is medium. You cannot argue with that. He is sitting in a chair built for a four-year-old.

Then somebody asks how old he is. Released eighteen months ago. The boy who asked is four. Everyone on that rug has been alive longer than the guest speaker, and they do the math faster than he does.

Adults ask an AI what it can do. Kids ask what it is and how old it is, and those turn out to be the harder questions. Every answer Adam gives is correct. None of them survive a room full of preschoolers.

None of this happened. Nobody has invited a robot to reading day. I cast my own boys as the class because I know exactly how they would handle it. What I like is that the newest thing in the building is also the youngest one there, and the four-year-olds are the first to notice. He does get to read the book. He just reads it quietly.