I did an oil painting of Paris in a wine glass

“Is the moon inside the glass or behind it?”

A friend asked when I shared it.

“How does it matter?. It is a glass after all”, I responded.

But the question triggered something. The question about the moon was not about the moon at all. It was about how LLM’s work.

AI takes the entire internet and squeezes it into one answer. Years of research become a paragraph. All that knowledge, all that data, all those contradictions, squeezed into one neat paragraph. It is like pouring an entire city into a wine glass.

But here is the thing about my painting. The Eiffel Tower inside the glass is obviously not the real Eiffel Tower. It is a version of it. Filtered through curved glass and red wine. The proportions are slightly off. The colours are warmer than reality. The context of the city around it is gone. What you see is compelling, but it is not complete.

That is AI in 2026.

Every AI output is Paris through a wine glass. It looks right. It feels right. It might even be more beautiful than the original. But it has been filtered, compressed, and reframed. The mess, the complexity, the contradictions of the real city are missing.

It works as long as you know you are looking through a glass.

The danger is not AI getting things wrong. The danger is AI presenting a filtered view so confidently that we forget there is an entire city behind the glass that we are not seeing. After all, every AI output is Paris through a wine glass

We do not ask these questions because the glass is so beautiful.

Use AI. Look through the glass. Appreciate what it shows you. But never forget to look beyond it too.

Because there might be a more beautiful moon outside the glass than the one inside it.

Oil painting of Paris in a wine glass