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AI is Not Artificial — It Mirrors the Human Minds That Create It. Are You Seeing It Too, in AI and in Your Own Creation?

Being Human for a Better Tomorrow in the Age of AI

  • October 24, 2025
  • 58th Edition
AI is not artificial

Context

For over a year since our 12th edition, we’ve been exploring AI—how to do well and be well in this transformative age. Usage keeps growing, the technology continues evolving, and debates rage on: Is AI good or bad? Have we reached new heights or hit a plateau?

Our answers and views are evolving. To me, it’s more interesting to see it for what it reveals—and what we can learn from it. AI doesn’t seem to be another technology, something separate and “Artificial.”

The word Artificial often implies something made by humans to resemble something natural, yet separate from us – think of lab-grown diamonds mimicking mined ones, rayon resembling silk, or neoprene standing in for rubber. These are products of human ingenuity.

But AI is different. It steps beyond being merely a product. In its current, rapidly evolving form, AI acts more like a mirror. It’s not just a product, like a tool; it’s becoming an echo of our minds.

It reflects how we think, how we approach problems, how we dream of a better world. The systems we build inevitably carry the imprint of their creators – their vision, their values, their constraints, their very ways of seeing and seeking. Like every human creation, AI possesses an intelligence and self-expression born from the minds and conditions that shaped it.

“I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream.”
— Vincent van Gogh

The artist and the art become inseparable, both undeniably real. We could view AI through a similar lens and hold the mirror to see how technology reflects very human minds.

Let’s hold up that mirror to four widely used LLMs I regularly use. The reflections reveal strikingly distinctive mindsets.

Mirror 1: OpenAI – The Reflection of Human Ambition

If the AI journey begins with capturing attention, then OpenAI embodies the human drive for ubiquity and transformation. Their ambition wasn’t just to build capable AI, but to weave it into the fabric of daily life – at work, at home, in education.

This arc of ambition is evident in their relentless pace:

  • They ignited the public imagination with ChatGPT in late 2022, rapidly scaling to 700M Weekly Active Users reaching ~2.5 billion prompts per day by mid-2025 as per OpenAI.
  • They continuously pushed the boundaries from text generation to multi-modal understanding (GPT-4), broad integration via APIs, agentic capabilities for computer use, and building devices for physical AI.
  • The product expansion is backed by massive investments in infrastructure, signalling a commitment to delivering AI transformation at a planetary scale.

OpenAI mirrors the human desire to take a breakthrough idea and make it universally accessible, reshaping the world in the process.

Mirror 2: Anthropic/Claude – The Reflection of Conscientiousness and Wisdom

In contrast to relentless expansion, Anthropic and its AI Claude reflect a different human impulse: temper the growth with the drive to pair power with responsibility, to build with caution and ethical foresight.

Born from directional differences with OpenAI, Anthropic structured itself as a Public Benefit Corporation guided by a Long-Term Benefit Trust, aiming to balance progress with safety.

This arc of safety is clear from the outset. Anthropic emphasised depth and reliability in Claude’s responses (seen in models like Opus and Sonnet), recently enhancing this with features like Claude Skills.

They pioneered and transparently deployed Constitutional AI – training models with explicit ethical principles – achieving impressive results in blocking harmful outputs (like ~95% of universal jailbreaks) with minimal impact on helpfulness.

Their research delves into mechanical interpretability, seeking to understand the “black box” of AI decision-making to better ensure fairness and safety.

Anthropic mirrors the essential human wisdom that capability must be guided by conscientiousness and wisdom, ensuring our powerful creations serve beneficial ends.

Mirror 3: Google/Gemini – The Reflection of Human Systems Thinking

Google’s journey with Gemini reflects the human capacity for large-scale systems integration and infrastructural thinking. Leveraging decades of experience in powering global platforms like Search and YouTube, alongside deep investments in hardware (like TPUs reaching over 2x FLOPS per chip in v5p pods) and fundamental AI research (Transformers, DeepMind), Google aimed to embed AI seamlessly across its vast ecosystem.

This arc of systems and scale is visible in Gemini’s design for ambient utility, integrating into Search via AI Overviews (used by ~2 billion monthly users) and deeply into Workspace tools (>1.5 billion users), yielding significant productivity gains (e.g., 42% faster document drafting).

It offers inherent multi-modal capabilities and long context windows designed to handle complex information across formats. Google also created unified platforms like Gemini Enterprise, offering integrated AI capabilities for businesses.

Google mirrors the human impulse not just to invent, but to build the enduring infrastructure that integrates new capabilities into the everyday workings of civilisation at scale.

Mirror 4: DeepSeek – The Reflection of Inventiveness Under Constraint

While OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google operated with vast resources, DeepSeek emerged as a powerful reflection of human ingenuity thriving under constraint.

Facing limitations in access to cutting-edge GPUs, capital, and talent pools compared to Silicon Valley, DeepSeek didn’t just compete – they innovated on fundamentals, setting a different course for technology.

Their arc of invention showcases:

  • Architectural elegance, using novel techniques (like sparse Mixture of Experts, Multi Latency Head, FP8 training, and advancements in Reinforcement Learning like R1-Zero) to achieve state-of-the-art reasoning performance with remarkable efficiency.
  • Engineering breakthroughs in areas like visual tokenisation for images (achieving 10× OCR compression @ 97% accuracy; 20× @ 60%) , allowing efficient handling of unstructured complex data even with limited resources.
  • Radical cost disruption, offering API access at dramatically lower price points (e.g., V3.2-Exp tiers below $0.03 per 1M input tokens), sparking an industry-wide “efficiency race” and enabling new use cases for smaller players and edge deployments.

All of this was accomplished impressively with a commitment to openness, sharing model weights and technical details, fostering community respect.

DeepSeek mirrors the timeless human story of resourcefulness – how constraints can paradoxically become the catalyst for profound breakthroughs, the David finding an unexpected advantage against Goliaths.

Echoes Through History: A Cognitive Renaissance

Looking at these, the state and direction of AI are mirrored reflections of enduring human qualities and values: the ambition to transform, the conscientiousness to build wisely, the holistic thinking to integrate complex systems, and the inventiveness that sparks progress even from scarcity.

AI models are extensions of the human minds that conceived them, carrying the DNA of their creators’ intent and context.

This moment, where AI acts as a mirror to our creative diversity and distribution, echoes previous turning points in human history.

The Renaissance wasn’t just an artistic creativity flourishing; it was an explosion of human expression across disciplines – art, science, literature, music. Major Italian centers saw painting production increase tenfold, scientific treatises proliferated across Europe (>1,000 in the 16th century), vernacular literature surged, and printed music scores spread rapidly after 1501. It profoundly changed how humans expressed themselves and saw the world.

In distribution, the printing press didn’t just replicate texts; it revolutionised access to knowledge. It enabled the rapid dissemination of ideas, standardising information and fuelling literacy. From its invention in 1440, the technology spread to hundreds of cities, producing over 20 million books by 1500 and perhaps 200 million by 1600.

The Age of AI combines these forces: it amplifies human creativity and expression like the Renaissance, and it democratizes access to cognitive tools like the Printing Press. It mirrors our minds and multiplies their reach, heralding perhaps a new Cognitive Renaissance for all.

AI Mirrors the Diversity We Cherish

Nature thrives on diversity, and so does human progress. The emergence of multiple, distinct AI approaches is not a sign of fragmentation, but a reflection of this essential truth.

The Age of AI is not converging towards one monolithic “Big Brother,” but blossoming into an ecosystem of “many children,” each reflecting different facets of their parent minds. This diversity gives us users choice, freedom, and resilience.

I have been tracking and using different AI technologies over the past year and a half has deepened my understanding of this mirror we’re creating.

In Edition 51, six months ago, I shared how Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT each revealed distinct approaches to my collaboration—different cognitive personalities:

View Article

Since then, the partnership has evolved into territory I hadn’t anticipated: verifying research sources with rigour, co-designing web elements, codifying thinking and writing style you’re reading now across 58 editions. Each AI brings something different to the work. Claude excels at structured thinking and ethical reasoning. Gemini gives deep context memory and supplemental thinking. ChatGPT offers creative breadth and conversational ease. DeepSeek is a counter voice.

You provide the core thought and shape the narrative, but the ability to choose from different types of intelligence for different parts of the process gives you a powerful new form of agency.

This isn’t just about productivity tools. It’s about recognising that AI can be a genuine thinking partner—not replacing human judgment, but extending it in ways that mirror our own cognitive diversity back to us.

  1. Would you agree? When you interact with AI, do you sense the human minds – the ambition, the caution, the systems thinking, the inventiveness – reflected back at you?
  2. Do you see yourself, your own ways of thinking and creating, mirrored not just in the AI systems we build, but in everything you bring into the world?
  3. Is the diversity we see emerging in AI as valuable to our future as the diversity we cherish in humanity?

Thanks for reading and sharing. I welcome and look forward to your reactions and thoughts.

As patterns become clearer and use cases scale from pilots to first-mover enterprise-wide adoption, we are in the Middle Age for software AI

View Article

As patterns become clearer and use cases scale from pilots to first-mover enterprise-wide adoption, we are in the Middle Age for software AI

View Article

But a new Early Age is dawning for Physical AI, where intelligence begins to move and act in our world. And none of this creation happens without the believers and enablers—the leaders, investors, and policymakers who shape the conditions for progress. More on these in the editions ahead.

 

Let’s continue to learn, explore, find our voices and agency to inspire a our new Renaissance in this Age of AI.

 

Best wishes

“AI is a language. Treat it like one: practice, iterate, and mind your grammar prompts, assumptions, and verification.”

II. Questioning / Asking

Good conversations flow from well‑sequenced questions—topical, simple, coherent, cohesive.
LLM Conversation Example 1
Q: What are empirical judgments?

A: Empirical judgments are based on observation, experience, or experimentation.
Q: What are moral judgments?

A: Moral judgments are based on ethical principles and values.

IV. Judgment

“The structure of a language affects its speakers’ worldview and cognition.”
— Henry Hazlitt
“The art of questioning is the source of all knowledge.”
— Thomas Berger
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One Response

  1. Your point of view caught my eye and was very interesting. Thanks. I have a question for you.

    Reply

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