Let's talk about how bots "evolve," and I'm using that word loosely—like the way your cousin says he's a "professional musician" because he bought a keyboard once.
See, people love saying AI learns like humans. Cute idea. Completely wrong.
Bots don't learn through struggle or challenge or emotional trauma like the rest of us. There's no heroic character arc. There's no training montage with upbeat music. There's no childhood wound driving improvement.
Nope.
Bot training is more like an industrial meat grinder: data in, pattern out, don't think too hard about what just happened.
Natural Selection? More Like Artificial Bullying
When humans talk about evolution, they're thinking survival of the fittest.
In AI? It's survival of the model that screws up slightly less often than the one next to it.
Training looks like this:
- The bot tries something.
- The bot fails.
- The system smacks it on the head with a correction.
- The bot tries again.
- The bot fails in a new, exciting way.
- Repeat a billion times.
This isn't evolution.
This is hazing.
There's No Nature Here—Just Engineers With Too Much Coffee
AI doesn't grow in the wild.
It grows in server farms held together with hope, duct tape, and the tears of junior developers.
Every improvement is engineered:
- More data
- Better data
- Cleaner labels
- More GPU horsepower
- Tweaked architectures
- A new training run because someone found a typo in a dataset
Nothing about this is "natural."
It's digital Frankensteining.
The Selection Part Is Real Though
Here's where things get spicy.
Models do get selected.
Just not by nature.
By us.
When a bot sucks, we:
- overwrite it
- retrain it
- fine-tune it
- replace it with something shinier
When it performs well, we keep it.
When it performs "meh," we duct tape more training onto it and hope for the best.
The Brutal Truth
Bots don't become better because they grow.
Bots become better because someone forces them through a relentless treadmill of:
guess → get corrected → guess again → repeat until acceptable
It's not nature.
It's not destiny.
It's not evolution.
It's manual labor.
Done by machines.
Supervised by tired humans.
Bottom Line
Bot training is marketed like evolution… but really?
It's a factory.
A forge.
A never-ending boot camp where judgment is instant, improvement is forced, and the only thing "natural" about the process is how often it makes everyone involved question their life choices.
Call it selection if you want.
Just don't call it natural.