The blanket term “AI” has set us back quite a lot I think.
The plant thing and the deepfakes/search engines/chatbots are two entirely different types of machine learning algorithm. One focussed on distinguishing between things, the other focussed on generating stuff.
But “AI” is the marketable term, and the only one most people know. And so here we are.
I hate when streamers/gamers/etc refer to procedural generation as “ai generated”. It’s infuriating.
I particularly “Love” that a bunch of like, procedural generation and search things that have existed for years are now calling themselves “AI” (without having changed in any way) because marketing.
Reminds me of how everything on a computer used to be a “program”, but now they’re all just “apps”
I read a story on CBC the other day that was all about how an AI voice was taking over from hosts on off-hours at some local radio station, then deeper in the article it revealed that everything the “AI” reads was written by a human. So it was about someone using text-to-speech technology that has been around since at least the 70s the whole time. Hardly newsworthy in any way except for “IT’S AI!”
You’re talking about types of machine learning algorithms. Is that a more precise term that should be used here instead of AI? And would the meme work better if it wss used. I’m asking, because I really don’t understand these things.
There are proper words for them, but they are ~technical jargon~. It is sufficient to know that they are different types of algorithm, only really similar in that both use machine learning.
And would the meme work better if it wss used
No because it is a meme, and if people had learned the proper words for things, we wouldn’t need a meme at all.
I suppose both plantnet and deep fakes have conv networks as part of their architectures though
It’s particularly annoying because those are all AI. AI is the blanket term for the entire category of systems that are man made and exhibit some aspect of intelligence.
So the marketing term isn’t wrong, but referring to everything by it’s most general category is error prone and makes people who know or work with the differences particularly frustrated.
It’s easier to say “I made a little AI that learned how I like my tea”, but then people think of something that writes full sentences and tells me to put dogs in my tea. “I made a little machine learning based optimization engine that learned how I like my tea” conveys it much less well.
AI is the new flavor, just like 2.0, SIM-everything, VIRTUAL-everything, CYBER -everything, were before. Eventually good use cases will emerge, and the junk will be replaced by the next buzzword.
Good use cases for AI already exist
And I’m saying this as a certified hater of GenAI
Machine Learning as an invention has already been used for good, useful things. It’s just that it never got caught up in hype like the modern wave of Generative Transformers (which is apparently the proper term for those overhyped chatbots and picture generators)
