And You Thought YOU Were Bad at Math (AI Stinks At It)‽
Why Can't AI Do Simple Math?
AI Stinks Like Rotten Meat (Apologies to Langston Hughes) — when it comes to math, anyway.
First, a little context: I am going to be helping some kids with their homework, and part of it will doubtless be math (addition, subtraction, multiplication, calculus).
I have always done (simple) math (the types listed above) in my head, so I didn’t know the “canonical” way to multiply. IOW, if you can’t or don’t want to do math in your head, how do you “work it out” on paper?
Needing to know the way of doing it that way so that I can teach/explain that methodology, I googled (asked AI), “how to do multiplication”
This is what it gave me:
The “long multiplication” explanation was fine (truncated above), but czech out the “horizontal multiplication” explanation AI gives: It claims in step 3 that 105 + 84 = 945 (of course, 105 + 84 is actually 189). The 945 is, indeed, the correct answer to 45 X 21, but saying (in step 2) to multiply 21 by 4 is where AI went wrong; it should be either “Multiply 21 by 40” or “Multiple 21 by 4 and then add a zero” (because the 4 is in the 10s position).
21 X 40 = 840
21 X 4 = 84; append a 0 and it becomes 840
Whichever methods “floats your boat” is fine, but AI’s guidance is wrong.
For most people, though, this methodology is only practical with smaller numbers. E.g., what if you want to multiply 67 by 314? Now you have to multiply 67 X 4 in your head, etc., which a lot of people would find challenging. So for numbers larger than a couple of digits, the simple and sensible thing is to use a calculator.
The bottom line is, AI is good for some things (creating images [usually]), such as the one above (“a 65-year-old scottish man confused about something on his phone”)), but don’t trust it for anything that matters; not yet, anyway (and probably not for a long time, if ever).
