Can AI Churn out Tall Tales

Originally published on LinkedIn on July 28, 2026

This morning, commentator Tucker Carlson urged Americans to stop paying their credit cards, comparing credit card companies to drug dealers. He also shared that he personally—with a salary of $10 million annually—has no debt.

Obviously his advice is preposterous and doesn’t account for why people depend on credit cards to pay for everyday necessities, finance large purchases, and make it to the next payday. With wages stagnant and the price of everything increasing, credit card debt in the U.S. reached $1.21 trillion in 2025 with the average American household having $9,144 in credit card debt.

Nevertheless, pundits like Tucker can freely babble, spreading bad advice, misinformation, and conspiracies. The spotlight, however, tends to be shown on AI for its potential to deceive.

AI—which I envision as a stack of encyclopedias—can’t think independently. It generates responses based on human-feed predefined algorithms and instructions. It doesn’t wake up in the morning and poop out fabrications.

My pipsqueak puppy has more sensory, common sense, and conscious reasoning than common multimodal large-scale AI models. How could that be possible?

Sensory: Physical interactions, such as rain on your face or smell of a school cafeteria, provide real-world understanding. AI can’t sense anything, trapped in a binary world with a splash of probabilities and patterns.

Common sense: Experiencing life shapes common sense, such as receiving a call from an acquaintance, asking for money, and recognizing it’s a scam because the caller is notoriously frugal and has a plentiful bank account. It’s difficult to train an AI model (dataset) using esoteric, highly personalized information.

Consciousness (subjective): Humans are riddled with variables, which can’t be taught. Our point-of-views and perceptions can change daily, depending on evolving situations. These variables fuel human innovation, creativity, and reasoning.

No doubt, it’s increasingly difficult to discern what’s real or fake, especially pictures and videos. Even so, I always arrive at the same conclusion. AI isn’t the culprit. It can’t churn out tall tales, fallacies, and simulation imagery unless a human is the one prompting or training it to do so.