Me too. Almost every Sci-Fi AI proceeds from the premise that we will make something very obviously machine and then have to train it to seem more human. I was completely caught off guard by us taking the approach of distilling all available human output into a statistical model and using it to brute-force something resembling thought and personality through sheer data processing scale.

The unsurprising part once it was clear that approach was viable, was that humans wouldn’t be able to help but anthropomorphize it. I feel like the movie Ex Machina is more relevant than ever.