The Scotsman AI Fallacy

When someone shares a genuine frustration with AI like a hallucination, a bias, or a workflow meltdown, like clockwork the replies are always the same:

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

It’s the ultimate deflection. Not a flaw in the technology, but in you.

Welcome to the Scotsman AI Fallacy: the rhetorical sleight-of-hand where true AI is always just out of reach, redefined with every wave of criticism. The goalposts aren’t just moving, they’re 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..."

Sam Altman’s AGI? A shapeshifter. One day it’s an existential threat; the next, a 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.

This isn’t just annoying. It's a 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. AI promised democratization, not a priesthood of prompt wizards.

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.

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