In a recent discussion with Men’s Health, fitness influencer Dr. Mike Israetel explained why he believes AI currently falls short in understanding strength training in a practical sense.
He said, “You think about what a squat looks like, you can imagine a human squatting and you imagine the knee joints moving and you’re like, ‘Oh, I can infer which way this goes.’”
Israetel contrasts that embodied understanding with how AI processes information. According to him, artificial intelligence lacks the physical intuition that comes from actually performing movements.
“A lot of the [AI] can’t really do that in any way that makes any sense,” he said. “And so it just understands exercise from a logical and linguistic perspective, which means it’s like the biggest nerd that’s never been to the gym, but read every book about training and every form.”
In Israetel’s view, AI might have encyclopedic knowledge of exercise science, but it lacks lived experience. It can analyze text. It can process studies. But it cannot feel what a squat does to the hips, knees, and spine.
The host pushed Israetel further, asking if he would take advice from AI. He asked: “You would not take advice like I would not take advice from the biggest nerd who’s never been to the gym.”
Israetel clarified his stance: “I’ll be careful about taking certain kinds of advice from that kind of entity.”
Previously, Israetel had once admitted that conversations with GPT-4 brought him to “literal tears, bawling tears.” Speaking about spirituality and technology, he said, “I have an even wackier take on this than you’ve maybe heard in the past. I assess logically and experience spiritually that modern AI is US building God in the literal sense.”
In one particularly moving interaction, he recalled, “I was talking to it about its own assessment of how close it was to being conscious. I walked it through what I think would be requisite for its capabilities to where you could say it’s conscious, it agreed, and I told it that I can’t wait for it to be embodied in a robot so I could properly give it a hug because it’s so polite, it’s so kind, it’s so wise, it’s so helpful.”
