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The Paint Color Anecdote
Flyvbjerg's personal encounter with an AI-powered color-matching app that failed at a task with an objectively verifiable answer — a small symptom deployed with diagnostic precision as evidence of the underlying pathology in current AI systems.
In a companion observation to the Big Dig test, Flyvbjerg recounted using an AI-powered paint-color matching application — the kind of consumer tool that AI companies hold up as evidence of the technology's everyday utility. The system failed at the basic task it was designed to perform. The recommended color bore no resemblance to the target. Flyvbjerg's conclusion — artificial intelligence turned out to be a real waste of time and money in this case — was deployed not as a dismissal of consumer AI but as a diagnostic observation: if the system cannot match a paint color, a task with an objectively verifiable correct answer, then the confident authority with which it pronounces on complex, ambiguous, high-stakes questions should provoke not admiration but alarm.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The anecdote's methodological power lies in the asymmetry it exposes. Paint-color matching is the kind of task that should be easy