When people share their real frustration with AI like a hallucination, a bias, or a workflow explosion, like clockwork the replies are always the same:

  • "You're just not using it right."
  • "Skill issue."
  • "Prompt better."

It's the ultimate deflection. It's not a flow in the technology, it's in you and your fat fingers.

Welcome to the Scotsman AI Fallacy era. It's a rhetorical sleight-of-hand where true AI is always just out of reach, redefined with every wave of criticism. The goalpost is bobbing on a buoy in a stormy sea of hype. One minute AGI means "human-like reasoning," the next it's "stochastic parroting with extra steps." Try to pin it down, and the evangelists drag it into deeper water. "Ah, but that’s not real AI..."

What is Sam Altman's definition of AGI? For all I know, it's a skinchanger. One day it's an existential threat, the next, your co-pilot for spreadsheets. Critique its feasibility, and the definition morphs by breakfast. It's a convenient magic trick. When AI stumbles, the problem is never the tech's limitations, it's your ignorance, your impatience, your lack of imagination.

The Pattern:

  1. Failure occurs (e.g., AI generates dangerous medical advice).
  2. Criticism follows (e.g., "This tool is unreliable").
  3. Gaslighting ensues (e.g., "You didn’t constrain the context window properly").

Suddenly, the burden isn't on the tool to improve. It's on you to contort your expectations, master hidden syntax, or worship at the altar of "iterative progress." Fail, and you’re no true Scotsman.

It's annoying, it's unfair, it's the best way to avoid accountability. If "proper use" requires PhD-level prompt engineering or blind faith in vaporware updates, then the tool has failed its purpose.

When someone sneers "you’re not using it right," ask:

"Then why did you sell it as intuitive?"

Unless AI serves us, not the other way around, we’re all just drowning in the evangelists' wake.