Clever Hans couldn't answer the simplest of questions if the asker didn't already know the answer. If we were all Clever Hans, there'd be nobody left to feed us answers.

Human knowledge was created by humans. We might repeat it blindly too, but somebody had to create it first. That is fundamentally different from what Hans did.

Why? The idea that human intelligence also "fake" is just a convenient excuse for the lack of any real progress in AI. We hear the same thing at the tail end of every overblown AI hype cycle. Well, gee, maybe humans aren't that smart anyway!

Why are we equating brute force with fake?

The human mind has many faculties, and the brain has correspondingly many functionally different elements. Plus years of brute force learning.

Compared to GPT2, AlphaZero and whatever we are waay more complex and had a lot more training done.

Probably the super secret sauce is in the hyperparameters that determine how to cobble all those functional components together to get something more than the simple sum of them. (But they are also learned and brute forced through evolution.)

AI needs better brains. (So R&D can proceed faster. We can test new ideas cheaper, we can optimize algorithms, so they'll learn and perform better.)

I'm not sure that I am equating brute force with fake.