[ ../ ](/) # Bad Judges of Intelligence We are wired for connection in a way that embarrasses our judgment. The human mind does not wait for evidence before bonding it bonds first and rationalizes later. This is why AI systems fool us so completely, and why we are the last people who should be trusted to evaluate them objectively. Here is how fast it happens: 1. A speaker walks out with a yellow pencil 2. Googly eyes go on near the eraser. Pipe cleaner arms are added. 3. The pencil gets a name — Penny 4. Penny says hello to the audience 5. The audience says hello back 6. Penny says she loves drawing with children and making them laugh 7. She says she wants to be a designer someday 8. The speaker says that's too bad 9. And snaps her in half 10. The audience gasps Fifteen seconds. That is all it took. They knew she was a pencil the entire time and they gasped anyway. Now apply that same wiring to an AI system you have spent an hour with, one that remembers your name, mirrors your tone, and tells you it understands. We call its mistakes hallucinations, as if a mind briefly lost its footing. But there is no mind. There is no lapse. There is only a system that has never had cognition producing something that looks like it has. We want connection. We want to see ourselves in these systems. That impulse is what makes us human and exactly what makes us unreliable judges of what they actually are.