‘Probably’ doesn’t mean the same thing to your AI as it does to you

Humans and AIs have different methods of calculating words about probability like ‘maybe’ and ‘likely’ – and different interpretations about what they mean.

By: Mayank Kejriwal, University of Southern California, The Conversation

Outlets: The Conversation

Published: February 24, 2026

Words: 736

Last Updated: 2 weeks, 2 days ago

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By Mayank Kejriwal, University of Southern California

When a human says an event is “probable” or “likely,” people generally have a shared, if fuzzy, understanding of what that means. But when an AI chatbot like ChatGPT uses the same word, it’s not assessing the odds the way we do, my colleagues and I found.

We recently published a study in the journal NPJ Complexity that suggests that, while large language model AIs excel at …

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