Ask Lemmy

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.”

I call it a probability box.

"real ai" isn't a coherent concept.

Turing test isn't a literal test. It's a rhetorical concept that turing used to underline his logical positivist approach to things like intelligence, consciousness etc.

AI experts in interviews will tell you that like 99% of phrasing around AI used by people is fundamentally incorrect, and that management of corporations are the worst about it.

People keep saying this, but AI has been used for subroutines nowhere near actual artificial intelligence since at LEAST as long as video games have existed

I've ranted about this to several people too. Intelligence is hard to define and trying to define it has a horrible history linked to eugenics. That said, I feel like a minimum definition is that it has the capacity to understand the meaning and/or impact of what it is saying and/or doing, which current "AI" is so far from doing.

I saw a streamer call a procedurally generated level "ai generated" and I wanted to pull my hair out

LOL, ask anyone in IT marketing how they feel about AI.

Don't worry, the hype will die sooner than later, just like with cryptocurrencies. What will remain are the power and resource hungry statistical models doing nice work in some specific domains, some long faces and some people having made a bunch of money from it. But yeah, the term also makes me angry, that's why I started referring to them as statistical models.

Am I the only one seeing a parallel between the spectrum planned <-> "free"-market economy and classical algorithm <-> statistical model/ML? It seems that some people prefer to have some magic invisible handle their problems instead of doing the tough work. I'm not saying that there is not space for both but we seem to be leaning on the magic side a bit too much lately.

The term “Fuzzy logic” has apparently been around since 1965, can’t keep calling it that.. not that all AI falls under that but a lot of what gets marketed as that would.

It really depends on how you define the term. In the tech world AI is used as a general term to describe many sorts of generative and predictive models. At one point in time you could've called a machine that can solve arithmetic problems "AI" and now here we are, Feels like the goalpost gets moved further every time we get close so I guess we'll never have "true" AI?

So, the point is, what is AI for you?

Yes, AI term is used for marketing, though it didn't start with LLMs, a couple of years before, any ML algorithm was called AI together with the trendy data scientist job.

However, I do think LLMs are very useful, just try them for your daily tasks, you'll see. I'm pretty sure they will become as common as a web search in the future.

Also, how can you tell that the human brain is not mostly a very powerful LLM hosting machine?

You are not. The word predictor hype is real