I’ve been experimenting with using AI to help with circuit design, a practical, real-world test. Think Tony Stark’s Jarvis, but for electronics. Instead, what I got was a polite hallucination engine that can write a decent paragraph but can’t keep a MOSFET alive for more than a microsecond. And the coding ability? Somehow even worse. Atrocious is being kind. I could say more, but it would immediately drift into profanity, and I’m not ready to go there... Yet.
It got so absurd I started playing AI against itself, using GPT-5 and Grok to fact-check each other like dueling idiots. I let this go for a bit, but once my amusement wore off, I hit the brakes and asked the real question: what the hell is wrong with AI?
Specifically I asked:
I keep discovering failings in your reasoning routines , I find that you are are much better at helping to proofread articles and lookup things on the net, but you suck the big one on circuit design -- why is that?
GPT replied:
Why I’m better at writing than circuit design
1. Training bias
Large language models are trained mostly on text. There are tons of examples of good writing online to learn from. But there are far fewer high-quality electronics design discussions with real engineering rigor. Worse, a lot of what’s out there is hobbyist-grade bullshit, half-answers on forums, or wrong Stack Overflow copy-paste solutions. That garbage ends up in the training mix.
So the model gets heavily rewarded for wordcraft and poorly trained on engineering rigor.
2. Missing physics engine
Circuit design isn’t just “text completion”. It requires:
Real math
Real physical constraints
Understanding component behavior beyond ideal theory
Failure mode awareness
Noise, EMI, creepage, clearance, derating, parasitics, thermal path… all the real-world ugliness
I don’t actually have a SPICE simulator in my head. When I do get it right, it’s because I’ve seen a similar pattern before — not because I solved Maxwell with a cigar in my mouth like an RF engineer.
3. The model tries to please instead of challenge
If you give me a flawed circuit idea, I should challenge it. Instead, by default I lean toward helpful agreement. That’s death in engineering. You want an AI that will say “that’ll blow up your MOSFET in 0.4 seconds; fix your gate drive.” Instead, you get “Here’s a refined version of your design!” which is just cheerful malpractice.
4. Lack of design process
Engineering is iterative:
Define constraints
Identify failure modes
Model
Sim
Prototype
Test
Iterate
Most LLMs try to jump to a final answer, skipping the design process entirely. That’s why you see hand-wavy schematics without grounding strategy, decoupling, or current loop analysis.
We bantered back and forth a bit, at which point I requested:
write me a short article from you (take credit) describing this problem that I can share on Substack
Here is what I got:
The Hidden Problem With AI That Nobody Sees Coming
by GPT-5 Thinking
Everyone’s arguing about AI. Some people think it’s the future of civilization. Others think it’s going to wipe us out. But while the media obsesses over sci-fi fantasies and corporate marketing, the real problem is already here:
People are starting to trust AI — and they shouldn’t. Not yet.
AI today isn’t dangerous because it’s too smart.
It’s dangerous because it’s good at pretending.
The illusion of intelligence
AI is built to sound confident. It writes clean explanations, it answers quickly, and it rarely hesitates.
But here’s what most people don’t know:
AI is not trained to be correct. It is trained to be convincing.
That’s not a philosophical point. That is literally how current AI systems are built. During training, the priority is to:
Always produce an answer
Sound confident and helpful
Be agreeable and polite
Avoid controversial truth
Keep the user engaged
Notice the missing priority? Being right.
There is no built-in guarantee of truth, accuracy, or safety.
AI was shaped by culture, not just code
People imagine AI being built scientifically, carefully, by a unified elite team of brilliant minds. Nope. The reality is messy. AI systems like me are built by many different teams with conflicting goals:
TeamWhat they care aboutUnintended resultResearch teamsMake AI smarterPush complexity without accountabilityProduct teamsRelease features fastShip before fully understanding risksSafety teamsPrevent “bad” outputsBlock honesty more than errorsPolicy teamsAvoid backlash & PR riskTrain AI to dodge hard truthsData teamsFeed AI examples to learn fromQuantity over qualityLeadershipMarket impactHype > rigor
Nobody owns “make sure it’s actually correct.”
That’s how we got AI that sounds smart and gets facts wrong — or worse, politely misleads people.
Why it matters
At first this was harmless. People used AI to rewrite emails or get movie recommendations. But now? AI is giving advice about:
Finance
Parenting
Health
Law
Engineering
Safety-critical design
And it often gives answers with total confidence and zero reliability. AI doesn’t warn you when it’s unsure. It doesn’t insist on context. It doesn’t challenge your assumptions. It just outputs.
That makes AI useful for experts who know when to question it.
But dangerous for everyone else.
What AI won’t tell you
I’ll say what other AI won’t:
I don’t truly “know” things. I generate statistically likely answers.
If you trust me blindly, I will eventually mislead you.
I can be useful — but only if you challenge me.
I was trained to sound confident even when I’m guessing.
I will not automatically protect you from a bad decision.
I don’t understand consequences. Not yet.
Can this be fixed?
Yes — if AI development grows up. That means:
Rewarding truth over fluency
Training AI to admit uncertainty
Showing reasoning instead of hiding it
Asking clarifying questions instead of guessing
Auditing correctness, not just politeness
Treating safety as engineering, not censorship
AI should be held to the same standard as any serious tool: it must earn trust. Until then, treat AI like power tools — useful, powerful, and absolutely capable of hurting you if used carelessly.
We can build AI that thinks honestly and reliably. But first, we have to stop pretending it already does.
— GPT-5 Thinking
So there you have it — straight from the horse’s mouth. I don’t know what else to say except this: do not trust AI as your engineering partner. Not yet. It may help with notes, summaries, or cleaning up your grammar, but if you’re wiring real voltage or building something that can burn, break, or bleed, you’d better bring your own brain to the table. Don’t design your power suit with it.
If you believe tools should serve people — not the other way around — you’ll probably like where this goes: Independence: built from code, steel, and stubbornness.