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.
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.
I remember the term AI being in use long before the current wave of LLMs. When I was a child, it was used to describe the code behind the behaviour of NPC in computer games, which I think is still used today. So, me, no, I don’t get agitated when I hear it, I don’t think it’s a marketing buzzword invented by capitalistic a-holes. I do think that using “intelligence” in AI is far too generous, whichever context it’s used in, but we needed some word to describe computers pretending to think and someone, a long time ago, came up with “artificial intelligence”.
Thank you for reminding me about NPCs,
we have indeed been calling them AI for years,
even though they are not capable of reasoning on their own.
Perhaps we need a new term,
e.g. AC (Artificial Consiousness),
which does not exists yet.
The term AI still agitates me though,
since most of these are not intelligent.
For example,
earlier this week I saw a post on Lemmy,
where a LLM suggested to a user to uninstall a package, which would definitely have broken his Linux distro.
Or my co-workers,
who asked development questions I had to the LLMs they use, which yet has to generate me something usefull / something that actually works.
To me it feels like they are pushing their bad beta products upon us,
in the hopes that we pay to use them,
so they can use our feedback to improve them.
I would argue that humans also frequently give bad advice and incorrect information. We regurgitate the information we read, and we’re notoriously bad at recognizing false and misleading info.
More important to keep in mind is that the vast, vast majority of intelligence in our world is much dumber than people. If you’re expecting greater than human intelligence as your baseline, you’re going to have a wildly different definition than the rest of the world.
For example,
earlier this week I saw a post on Lemmy,
where a LLM suggested to a user to uninstall a package, which would definitely have broken his Linux distro.
Colleagues of mine have also recommended me uninstalling required system packages. Does that mean my colleagues aren’t intelligent/conscious? That humans in general aren’t?
You’re not the only one but I don’t really get this pedantry, and a lot of pedantry I do get. You’ll never get your average person to switch to the term LLM. Even for me, a techie person, it’s a goofy term.
Sometimes you just have to use terms that everyone already knows. I suspect we will have something that functions in every way like “AI” but technically isn’t for decades. Not saying that’s the current scenario, just looking ahead to what the improved versions of chat gpt will be like, and other future developments that probably cannot be predicted.
What would a “real AGI” be able to do that an LLM cannot?
edit: again, the smartest men in the room loudly proclaiming their smartness, until someone asks them the simplest possible question about what they’re claiming
GPT3 was cheating and playing poorly, but original GPT4 played already in level of relatively good player, even in mid game (not found in the internet, do require understanding the game, not just copying). GPT4 turbo probably isn’t so good, openai had to make it dummer (read: cheaper)
Artificial intelligence might be really good, perhaps even superhuman at one thing, for example driving a car but that same competence doesn’t apply over variety of fields. Your self-driving car can’t help with your homework. With artificial general intelligence however, it does. Humans posses general intelligence; we can do math, speak different languages, know how to navigate social situations, know how to throw a ball, can interpret sights, sounds etc.
With a real AGI you don’t need to develop different versions of it for different purposes. It’s generally intelligent so it can do it all. This also includes writing its own code. This is where the worry about intelligence explosion origins from. Once it’s even slightly better than humans at writing its code it’ll make a more competent version of itself which will then create even more competent version and so on. It’s a chain reaction which we might not be able to stop. After all it’s by definition smarter than us and being a computer; also million times faster.
Edit: Another feature that AGI would most likely, though not neccessarily posses is consciousness. There’s a possibility that it feels like something to be generally intelligent.
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.
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.”
The only thing I really hate about “AI” is how many damn fonts barely differentiate between a capital “i” and lowercase “L” so it just looks like everyone is talking about some guy named Al.
Of course we have “real” AI. We can literally be surprised while talking to these things.
People who claim it’s not general AI consistently, 100% of the time, fail to answer this question: what can a human mind do that these cannot?
In precise terms. You say “a human mind can understand” then I need a precise technical definition of “understand”. Because the people making this claim that “it’s not general AI” are always trying to wave their own flag of technical expertise. So, in technical terms, what can a general AI do, that an LLM cannot?
Go and tell your LLM to click a button, or log into your Amazon account, or send an email, or do literally anything that’s an action. I’m waiting.
A 4 year old has more agency than your “AI” nowadays. LLMs are awesome at spitting out text, but they aren’t true AI.
Edit: I should add, LLMs only work with input. If there’s no input there is no output. So whatever you put in there, it will just sit there forever doing nothing until you give it an input again. It’s much closer to a mathematical function than any kind of intelligence that has its own motivation and can act on its own.
Go tell a kalahari bushman to click a button, or log into your amazon account, or send an email, or literally anything you don’t place in front of him as an option.
Is your whole point just that it would be GAI if it weren’t for those darned shackles, but it’s not AGI because we give it restrictions on sending POST requests?
Besides the detail that even Kalahari Bushmen have mobile phones now, primitive humans (or our ancestors) weren’t stupid. You could take a human from 1000 years ago and after they stop flipping out about computers and modern technology you’d be able to teach them to click a button in seconds to minutes (depending on how complex you make the task).
General AI can take actions on its own (unprompted) and it can learn, basically modifying its own code. If anyone ever comes up with a real AI we’d go towards the Singularity in no time (as the only limit would be processing power and the AI could then invest time into improving the hardware it runs on).
There are no “shackles” on ChatGPT, it’s literally an input output machine. A really damn good one, but nothing more than that. It can’t even send a POST request. Sure, you could sit a programmer down, parse the output, then do a request whenever ChatGPT mentions certain keywords with a payload. Of course that works, but then what? You have a dumb chatbot firing random requests and if you try to feed the result of those requests back in it’s going to get jumbled up with your text input you made beforehand. Every single action you want an LLM to take you’d have to manually program.
Besides the detail that even Kalahari Bushmen have mobile phones now, primitive humans (or our ancestors) weren’t stupid
Oh you bastard. You actually tried to reframe my words into exactly the opposite of what I was saying.
I did not use a Kalahari Bushman as an example of a stupid person. I used a Kalahari Bushman as an example of a general intelligence as smart as you or I, who can’t press buttons or buy things on Amazon for reasons of access not capability.
I need to cool down before I read the rest of your comment. Not cool dude, trying to twist what I said into some kind of racist thing. Not cool.
Exactly. Someone demonstrated an “AI that can turn on your lights” and then had a script checking for output like {turnOnLights} and translating that to API calls
Which again is literally just text and nothing more.
No matter how sophisticated ChatGPT gets, it will never be able to send the email itself. Of course you could pipe the output of ChatGPT into a cli, then tell ChatGPT to only write bash commands (or whatever you use) with every single detail involved and then it could possibly send an email (if you’re lucky and it only uses valid commands and literally no other text in the output).
But you can never just tell it: Send an email about x, here is my login and password, send it to whatever@email.com with the subject y.
I’ve the that confusion, too. I saw someone saying AI shouldn’t be controversial because we’ve already had AI in video games for years. It’s a broad and blanket term encompassing many different technologies, but people act like it all means the same thing.
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.
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