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 100% a marketing term.
It’s a computer science term that’s been used for this field of study for decades, it’s like saying calling a tomato a fruit is a marketing decision.
Yes it’s somewhat common outside computer science to expect an artificial intelligence to be sentient because that’s how movies use it. John McCarthy’s which coined the term in 1956 is available online if you want to read it
“Quantum” is a scientific term, yet it’s used as a gimmicky marketing term.
They didn’t just start calling it AI recently. It’s literally the academic term that has been used for almost 70 years.
The term “AI” could be attributed to John McCarthy of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), which Marvin Minsky (Carnegie-Mellon University) defines as "the construction of computer programs that engage in tasks that are currently more satisfactorily performed by human beings because they require high-level mental processes such as: perceptual learning, memory organization and critical reasoning. The summer 1956 conference at Dartmouth College (funded by the Rockefeller Institute) is considered the founder of the discipline.
perceptual learning, memory organization and critical reasoning
i mean…by that definition nothing currently in existence deserves to be called “AI”.
none of the current systems do anything remotely approaching “perceptual learning, memory organization, and critical reasoning”.
they all require pre-processed inputs and/or external inputs for training/learning (so the opposite of perceptual), none of them really do memory organization, and none are capable of critical reasoning.
so OPs original question remains:
why is it called “AI”, when it plainly is not?
(my bet is on the faceless suits deciding it makes them money to call everything “AI”, even though it’s a straight up lie)
so OPs original question remains: why is it called “AI”, when it plainly is not?
Because a bunch of professors defined it like that 70 years ago, before the AI winter set in. Why is that so hard to grasp? Not everything is a conspiracy.
I had a class at uni called AI, and no one thought we were gonna be learning how to make thinking machines. In fact, compared to most of the stuff we did learn to make then, modern AI looks godlike.
Honestly you all sound like the people that snidely complain how it’s called “global warming” when it’s freezing outside.
Yes your summary is correct, its just a buzzword.
You can still check if its a real human if you do something really stupid or speak or write giberisch. Almost every AI will try to reply to it or say “Sorry i couldnt understand it” or recent events ( most of the LLMs arent trained on the newest events )
I call it a probability box.
A lot of the comments I’ve seen promoting AI sound very similar to ones made around the time GME was relevant or cryptocurrency. Often, the conversations sounded very artificial and the person just ends up repeating buzzwords/echo chamber instead of actually demonstrating that they have an understanding of what the technology is or its limitations.
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.
