The apple covers the face of the figure standing there, rendering him an anonymous “everyman.” It shows an unidentified businessman wearing a bowler hat, a suit, and with a green apple floating in front of his face. The interpretation of the work that would get a good grade on an essay would argue that the painting means that all of us bear the mark of Original Sin and should be grateful for Christ’s sacrifice. Magritte wouldn’t like that answer, however “correct” an art history teacher might deem it to be. For Magritte, if you can explain his painting, he has failed—his paintings should prompt questions, confusion, wonder, without the viewer ever feeling that they “get it” and can comfortably move on to other things.

Why would Magritte seek to discredit a definite reading of his own creation? A dislike of art historians and a propensity to seek out information about an artist’s biography? Magritte does not want you to believe that you have figured out the puzzle, hence this is the solution. Absorb yourself in the process of finding a solution, but resist the urge to declare the riddle solved. John Locke, a philosopher, proposed that it is in our nature as humans to seek to comprehend the world around us. Feeling as though we do not understand something is uncomfortable. Even if our “understanding” is flawed, it still enables us to store the knowledge rather than keeping it open and unresolved, which scares us.

According to Locke, humans acquire knowledge through a variety of conceptions, representations, and ideas. We may be able to identify a parrot because we have an image of what we believe a parrot to look like stored in our minds. We refer to a creature as a parrot when we see it and it sufficiently resembles our mental image of an ideal parrot. Yet, if we see anything that we are unable to identify, like a bird with tentacles and a horn protruding from its head, we should be concerned. Something which is unknown. Our likely response would be to categorize this new, unidentified apparition using established categories. Given that it has feathers and wings, it is similar to birds.
There are two layers at play here. First is how we, humans, “understand” things—by comparing them with what they are not in the “computers” that are our minds. Then there is how machine learning and artificial intelligence ape the human mind and try to become a virtual version of it, there to do our bidding.
For instance, take the most famous and ubiquitous of AI software engines for generating text, ChatGPT.