Yes, we absolutely are different. Okay, maybe if you really boil down every little process our brains do there are similarities, we do also do pattern recognition, yes. But that isn’t all we do, or all ML systems do, either. I think you’re selling yourself short if you think you’re just recognising patterns!

The simplest difference between us and ML systems was pointed out by another commenter - they are trained on a dataset and then they remain static. We constantly re-evaluate old information, take in new information, and formulate new thoughts and change our minds.

We are able to perceive in ways that computers just can’t - they can’t understand what a smell is because they cannot smell, they can’t understand what it is to see in the way that we do because when they process images it is exactly the same to a computer as processing any other series of numbers. They do not have abstract concepts to relate recognised patterns to. Generative AI is unable to be truly creative in the way that we can, because it doesn’t have an imagination, it is replicating based on its inputs. Although, again, people on the internet love to say “that’s what artists do”, I think it’s pretty obvious that we wouldn’t have art in the way we do today if that was true… We would still be painting on the walls of caves.