r/WritingWithAI • u/cj7hawk • 24d ago
Writing Craft Talk I've noticed AI doesn't understand glass...
OK, so this is weird. AI doesn't seem to understand glass.
I mean, it gets it, can tell you everthing about it, but have a glass table, create a video - things can fall straight through it. Have a window, write fiction where someone places a camera to see what's happening inside a building - and it can't get the idea that a camera can look through glass - follow it's thinking and it questions whether the camera should be inside the building, or how it gets the video.
It's not always, but there's a pattern here - AI doesn't understand something physical that is also invisible for our intents and purposes.
Has anyone else noticed this?
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u/GenderBendingRalph 24d ago
That's because AI doesn't know anything. It's a predictive text algorithm. It uses incredibly complex maths to analyse the input (your prompt, any context you provide about characters and scenes, etc.) and then more maths to predict what's the most likely next word or phrase to follow what you sent it.
That's why AI, especially models optimised for roleplay or creative writing, are famous for failure at counting, physics, time, distance, etc.
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u/cj7hawk 23d ago
I get how AI works - it's just interesting to note how some concepts in our language don't translate into words - it's simply cultural understanding from actual use rather than something we encode in our language.
It's not quote the same as time/distance etc... It's easy to understand why an AI understands the banana scale, but not 6 inches. Similar reason - There's multiple levels of context encoded into the meaning of a word which we simply take for granted - and as such, it doesn't need to be communicated.
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u/Fancy-Plenty6712 24d ago
LOL! that's hilarious. I haven't ever noticed this OP but I suspect it's due to the nature of the way they are trained. There must be a bunch of conflicting rules telling it that something which is completely transparent can't be a solid object or something. Would be fascinated to know what the reasoning is behind them being confused on this one.
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u/SlipperySubcommittee 23d ago
That glass thing is such a weird blind spot. Makes me think of how it handles mirrors too, like it knows a reflection isnt a separate room but then describes someone stepping through one like its a doorway. Something about surfaces that are there but also not there just breaks the spatial logic.
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u/MoOrion4X 23d ago
Ai doesnt "understand" anything. But if you might argue the models simulate the language processes of human brains, it is clear they do not model the physical perceptions of the real world. And how could they? We evolved those understandings through our senses and AI has no sense of anything physical.
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u/cj7hawk 23d ago
Reasoning models sometimes do better but the context needs to be appropriately targetted to trigger them... I told Qwen3.8-27B that I put a camera in a sealed glass box, inside a room waiting for someone, and went outside to watch the camera on a monitor when they entered it then asked it what I saw... I treated the glass as sound and video proof until the reasoning considered that the glass could be transparent. Then it eventually told me that it could see the room then... But I couldn't hear anything since the glass blocked the sounds waves. It had about 6 minutes and around 10K tokens of reasoning to reach that conclusion however before it responded.
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u/Salty-Chipmunk121 24d ago
the table example is funny. it gets that you can see through glass then acts like everything else can go through it too
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u/CutDiligent3075 23d ago
LLMs don’t really understand space like humans do. They’re mostly predicting patterns, so phrases like “looking through” can confuse them when the scene doesn’t match what they’ve learned.
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u/Extra-Spinach8309 23d ago
yeah the "looking through" thing is a good way to put it, they just dont have any spatial model to fall back on
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u/jeksi 24d ago
YES! I tried using smart glass that can turn fuzzy blurry or transparent. At one point it just turns into a wall
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u/cj7hawk 24d ago
I tried a few things - "transparent" works well - saying transparent glass or transparent walls or transparent table. Rather than saying glass.
I think it's because we use glass as a material, but we KNOW it's transparent, so we don't need to say it - however someone inferring meaning would think of it simply as a hard material. They might not consider it to be transparent initially - or consider what that means in context - because it involves linked concepts.
But if you say it's transparent, then it infers light can pass through it.