When Ambiguity Helps: Rethinking How AI Interprets Our Data Questions
Opening — Why this matters now As businesses increasingly rely on natural language to query complex datasets — “Show me the average Q3 sales in Europe” — ambiguity has become both a practical headache and a philosophical blind spot. The instinct has been to “fix” vague queries, forcing AI systems to extract a single, supposedly correct intent. But new research from CWI and the University of Amsterdam suggests we’ve been asking the wrong question all along. Ambiguity isn’t the enemy — it’s part of how humans think and collaborate. ...