Am I the only one getting agitated by the word AI?
Am I the only one getting agitated by the word AI (Artificial Intelligence)?
Real AI does not exist yet,
atm we only have LLMs (Large Language Models),
which do not think on their own,
but pass turing tests
(fool humans into thinking that they can think).
Imo AI is just a marketing buzzword,
created by rich capitalistic a-holes,
who already invested in LLM stocks,
and now are looking for a profit.
AI is a forever-in-the-future technology. When I was in school, fuzzy logic controllers were an active area of “AI” research. Now they are everywhere and you’d be laughed at for calling them AI.
The thing is, as soon as AI researchers solve a problem, that solution no longer counts as AI. Somehow it’s suddenly statistics or “just if-then statements”, as though using those techniques makes something not artificial intelligence.
For context, I’m of the opinion that my washing machine - which uses sensors and fuzzy logic to determine when to shut off - is a robot containing AI. It contains sensors, makes judgements based on its understanding of “the world” and then takes actions to achieve its goals. Insofar as it can “want” anything, it wants to separate the small masses from the large masses inside itself and does its best to make that happen. As tech goes, it’s not sexy, it’s very single purpose and I’m not really worried that it’s gonna go rogue.
We are surrounded by (boring) robots all day long. Robots that help us control our cars and do our laundry. Not to mention all the intelligent, disembodied agents that do things like organize our email, play games with us, and make trillions of little decisions that affect our lives in ways large and small.
Somehow, though, once the mystery has yielded to math, society doesn’t believe these decision-making machines are AI any longer.
“AI” is the new “Innovate”, every time someone uses “innovate” in 2024, they’re just talking about how they’re stripping our rights away from things we owned.
I dislike it because it is usually used by the kind of people or media that live from buzzword to buzzword. IoT, Cloud, Big Data, Crypto, Web 3.0, AI, etc. I’m quite interested in deep learning and have done some research in the field as well. Personally, I don’t think AI is necessarily a misnomer, the term has been used forever, even for simple stuff like a naive Bayes classifier, A*, or decision trees. It’s just so unfortunate to see this insanely impressive technology being used as the newest marketing gimmick. Or used in unethical and irresponsible ways because of greed (looking at you, "Open"AI). A car doesn’t need AI, a fridge doesn’t need AI, most things don’t need AI. And AI is certainly not at the level where it makes sense to yeet 30% of your employees either.
I don’t hate AI or the awesome technology, I hate that it has become a buzzword and a tool for the lawless billionaires to do whatever they please.
It’s really bugging me that it’s a catch all buzzword that combines any art on the computer into AI when there’s a very hard line from what makes digital art physically drawn by a human and what defines AI. It really annoys me that the whole actors guild cannot seem to understand what vfx stands for and what is AI. Vfx involves hundreds of humans with strong intention and artistic talent of doing literal back breaking work. The other is one wanky human with strong intention speaking loud in a room making shitty graphics that pales in comparison. This still isn’t ‘AI’. This is an asshole with too much power and thinks they are as good as an artist.
someone sketching on photoshop is a human generated image. And this has nothing to do with AI yet so many idiots sweep it into the same bin simply because a paint brush, which is still physically used by a human, was made from 1s and 0s
It also disturbs me me that people don’t hold people accountable for fake ‘AI GENERATED’ news stories or deep fakes and just shrug their shoulders calling it AI. like “oops, skynet is taking over”. No. That’s a human. A shitty horrible human, again, on a computer given too much power. No machine has intention. Only humans do.
If a mobster boss asks someone to take a hit out on someone, mobster boss goes to jail for just as much damage as a murderer. Probably even more so because it is intention. Meanwhile everyone pretends a computer itself is coming up with all this junk as if no human with terrible intention is driving at the wheel.
I think we’ll be so desensitized by the term “A.I.”, that when it actually does happen we won’t realize what’s happened until after the fact. It’ll happen so gradually that we’ll just be like, “Wait… I think it’s actually thinking real thoughts.”
AI isn’t reserved for a human-level general intelligence. The computer-controlled avatars in some videogames are AI. My phone’s text-to-speech is AI. And yes, LLMs, like the smaller Markov-chain models before them, are AI.
In my first AI lecture at uni, my lecturer started off by asking us to spend 5 minutes in groups defining “intelligence”. No group had the same definition. “So if you can’t agree on what intelligence is, how can we possibly define artificial intelligence?”
AI has historically just described cutting edge computer science at the time, and I imagine it will continue to do so.
When I was in university (2002 or so) we had an “AI” lecture and it was mostly "if"s and path finding algorithms like A*.
So I would argue that us the engineers have been using the term to define a wider use cases long before LLM, CEO and marketing people did it. And I think that’s fine, as categorising algorithms/solutions as AI helps understand what they will be used for, and we (at least the engineers) don’t tend to assume an actual self aware machine when we hear that name.
nowadays they call that AGI, but it wasn’t always like that, back in my time it was called science fiction 😉
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