Am I the only one getting agitated by the word AI?

The word "AI" has been used for way longer than the current LLM trend, even for fairly trivial things like enemy AI in video games. How would you even define a computer "thinking on its own"?

I think a good metric is once computers start getting depression.
- It'll probably happen when they get a terrible pain in all the diodes down their left hand side.
- But will they be depressed or will they just simulate it because they're too lazy to work?
- Not sure about that. A LLM could show symptoms of depression by mimicking depressed texts it was fed. A computer with a true consciousness might never get depression, because it has none of the hormones influencing our brain.
- Wait until they found my GitHub repositories.
- The real metric is whether a computer gets so depressed that it turns itself off.
- A LLM can get depression, so that’s not a metric you can really use.
The best thing is enemy "AI" only needs to be made worse right away after creating it. First they'll headshot everything across the map in milliseconds. The art is to make it dumber.
it does not "think"

Real AGI does not exist yet. AI has existed for decades.

When did the etymology change?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence
- We have altered the etymology, pray we don’t alter it again.
- Have I claimed it has changed?
- One low hanging fruit thing that comes to mind is that LLMs are terrible at board games like chess, checkers or go.
  ChatGPT is a giant cheater.
- Be generally intelligent ffs, are you really going to argue that llms posit original insight in anything?
- So basically the ability to do things or learn without direction for tasks other than what it was created to do. Example, ChatGPT doesn't know how to play chess and Deep Blue doesn't write poetry. Either might be able to approximate correct output if tweaked a bit and trained on thousands, millions, or billions of examples of proper output, but neither are capable of learning to think as a human would.
- 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.
- I wrote this for another reply, but I'll post it for you too:
  It doesn't understand things like we think of with intelligence. It generates output that fits a recognized input. If it doesn't recognize the input in some form it generates garbage. It doesn't understand context and it doesn't try to generalize knowledge to apply to different things.
  For example, I could teach you about gravity, trees, and apples and ask you to draw a picture of an apple falling from a tree and you'd be able to create a convincing picture of what that would look like even without ever seeing it before. An LLM couldn't. It could create a picture of an apple falling from a tree based on other pictures of apples falling from trees, but not from just the knowledge of an apple, a tree, and gravity.

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)
yep and it has always been a leading misnomer like most marketing terms

I’d like to offer a different perspective. I’m a grey beard who remembers the AI Winter, when the term had so over promised and under delivered (think expert systems and some of the work of Minsky) that using the term was a guarantee your project would not be funded. That’s when the terms like “machine learning” and “intelligent systems” started to come into fashion.

The best quote I can recall on AI ran along the lines of “AI is no more artificial intelligence than airplanes are doing artificial flight.” We do not have a general AI yet, and if Commander Data is your minimum bar for what constitutes AI, you’re absolutely right, and you can define it however you please.

What we do have are complex adaptive systems capable of learning and problem solving in complex problem spaces. Some are motivated by biological models, some are purely mathematical, and some are a mishmash of both. Some of them are complex enough that we’re still trying to figure out how they work.

And, yes, we have reached another peak in the AI hype - you’re certainly not wrong there. But what do you call a robot that teaches itself how to walk, like they were doing 20 years ago at MIT? That’s intelligence, in my book.

My point is that intelligence - biological or artificial - exists on a continuum. It’s not a Boolean property a system either has or doesn’t have. We wouldn’t call a dog unintelligent because it can’t play chess, or a human unintelligent because they never learned calculus. Are viruses intelligent? That’s kind of a grey area that I could argue from either side. But I believe that Daniel Dennett argued that we could consider a paramecium intelligent. Iirc, he even used it to illustrate “free will,” although I completely reject that interpretation. But it does have behaviors that it learned over evolutionary time, and so in that sense we could say it exhibits intelligence. On the other hand, if you’re going to use Richard Feynman as your definition of intelligence, then most of us are going to be in trouble.

My AI professor back in the early 90's made the point that what we think of as fairly routine was considered the realm of AI just a few years earlier.
I think that's always the way. The things that seem impossible to do with computers are labeled as AI, then when the problems are solved, we don't figure we've created AI, just that we solved that problem so it doesn't seem as big a deal anymore.
LLMs got hyped up, but I still think there's a good chance they will just be a thing we use, and the AI goal posts will move again.
- I remember when I was in college, and the big problems in AI were speech-to-text and image recognition. They were both solved within a few years.
But what do you call a robot that teaches itself how to walk
In it's current state,
I'd call it ML (Machine Learning)
A human defines the desired outcome,
and the technology "learns itself" to reach that desired outcome in a brute-force fashion (through millions of failed attempts, slightly inproving itself upon each epoch/iteration), until the desired outcome defined by the human has been met.
- That definition would also apply to teaching a baby to walk.
- So what do you call it when a newborn deer learns to walk? Is that “deer learning?”
  I’d like to hear more about your idea of a “desired outcome” and how it applies to a single celled organism or a goldfish.
Exactly.
AI, as a term, was coined in the mid-50s by a computer scientist, John McCarthy. Yes, that John McCarthy, the one who invented LISP and helped develop Algol 60.
It's been a marketing buzzword for generations, born out of the initial optimism that AI tasks would end up being pretty easy to figure out. AI has primarily referred to narrow AI for decades and decades.
on the other hand calculators can do things more quickly than humans, this doesn't mean they're intelligent or even on the intelligence spectrum. They take an input and provide and output.
The idea of applying intelligence to a calculator is kind of silly. This is why I still prefer words like "algorithms" to "AI" as its not making a "decision". Its making a calculation, its just making it very fast based on a model and is prompt driven.
Actual intelligence doesn't just shut off the moment its prompted response ends - it keeps going.
- I think we’re misaligned on two things. First, I’m not saying doing something quicker than a human can is what comprises “intelligence.” There’s an uncountable number of things that can do some function faster than a human brain, including components of human physiology.
  My point is that intelligence as I define it involves adaptation for problem solving on the part of a complex system in a complex environment. The speed isn’t really relevant, although it’s obviously an important factor in artificial intelligence, which has practical and economic incentives.
  So I again return to my question of whether we consider a dog or a dolphin to be “intelligent,” or whether only humans are intelligent. If it’s the latter, then we need to be much more specific than I’ve been in my definition.

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'm agitated that people got the impression "AI" referred specifically to human-level intelligence.

Like, before the LLM boom it was uncontroversial to refer to the bots in video games as "AI." Now it gets comments like this.

I've seen 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.
Marketing is the reason for this.
I wholeheartedly agree, people use the term "AI" nowadays to refer to a very specific subcategory of DNNs (LLMs), but yeah, it used to refer to any more or less """smart""" algorithm performing.... Something on a set of input parameters. SVMs are AI, decision forests are AI, freaking kNN is AI, "artificial intelligence" is a loosely defined concept, any algorithm that aims to mimic human behaviour can be called AI and I'm getting a bit tired of hearing people say "AI" when they mean gpt-4 or stable diffusion.
- I've had freaking GAMERS tell me that "It isnt real AI" at this point.... No shit, the Elites in Halo aren't Real AI either
  Edit: Keep the downvotes coming anti LLMers, your tears are delicious

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.

"Al improves efficiency in..." Oh, good for him

Sam sung something for Al I heard
Right! Now I need to add extra clarification when I talk about Weird Al..
- To be fair, writing parody songs with wierd AI is 100% a thing you can do online now.
I got Proton to change their font for their password manager because of this.
I just happen to have a few generated passwords that contain both, plus the pipe symbol, and some of them I occasionally have to type manually.
- Don't they use different colors for capital vs lowercase vs number vs symbol?

AI has, for a long time been a Hollywood term for a character archetype (usually complete with questions about whether Commander Data will ever be a real boy.) I wrote a 2019 blog piece on what it means when we talk about AI stuff.

Here are some alternative terms you can use in place of AI, when they're talking about something else:

AGI: Artificial General Intelligence: The big kahuna that doesn't exist yet, and many projects are striving for, yet is as evasive as fusion power. An AGI in a robot will be capable of operating your coffee machine to make coffee or assemble your flat-packed furniture from the visual IKEA instructions. Since we still can't define sentience we don't know if AGI is sentient, or if we humans are not sentient but fake it really well. Might try to murder their creator or end humanity, but probably not.
LLM Large Language Model: This is the engine behind digital assistants like Siri or Alexa and still suffer from nuance problems. I'm used to having to ask them several times to get results I want (say, the Starbucks or Peets that requires the least deviation from the next hundred kilometers of my route. Siri can't do that.) This is the application of learning systems see below, but isn't smart enough for your household servant bot to replace your hired help.
Learning Systems: The fundamental programmity magic that powers all this other stuff, whether simple data scrapers to neural networks. These are used in a whole lot of modern applications, and have been since the 1970s. But they're very small compared to the things we're trying to build with it. Most of the time we don't actually call it AI, even for marketing. It's just the capacity for a program to get better at doing its thing from experience.
Gaming AI Not really AI (necessarily) but is a different use of the term artificial intelligence. When playing a game with elements pretending to be human (or living, or opponents), we call it the enemy AI or mob AI. It's often really simple, except in strategy games which can feature robust enough computational power to challenge major international chess guns.
Generative AI: A term for LLMs that create content, say, draw pictures or write essays, or do other useful arts and sciences. Currently it requires a technician to figure out the right set of words (called a prompt) to get the machine do create the desired art to specifications. They're commonly confused by nuance. They infamously have problems with hands (too many fingers, combining limbs together, adding extra limbs, etc.). Plagiarism and making up spontaneous facts (called hallucinating) are also common problems. And yet Generative AI has been useful in the development of antibiotics and advanced batteries. Techs successfully wrangle Generative AI, and Lemmy has a few communities devoted to techs honing their picture generation skills, and stress-testing the nuance interpretation capacity of Generative AI (often to humorous effect). Generative AI should be treated like a new tool, a digital lathe, that requires some expertise to use.
Technological Singularity: A bit way off, since it requires AGI that is capable of designing its successor, lather, rinse, repeat until the resulting techno-utopia can predict what we want and create it for us before we know we want it. Might consume the entire universe. Some futurists fantasize this is how human beings (happily) go extinct, either left to retire in a luxurious paradise, or cyborged up beyond recognition, eventually replacing all the meat parts with something better. Probably won't happen thanks to all the crises featuring global catastrophic risk.
AI Snake Oil: There's not yet an official name for it, but a category worth identifying. When industrialists look at all the Generative AI output, they often wonder if they can use some of this magic and power to facilitate enhancing their own revenues, typically by replacing some of their workers with generative AI systems, and instead of having a development team, they have a few technicians who operate all their AI systems. This is a bad idea, but there are a lot of grifters trying to suggest their product will do this for businesses, often with simultaneously humorous and tragic results. The tragedy is all the people who had decent jobs who do no longer, since decent jobs are hard to come by. So long as we have top-down companies doing the capitalism, we'll have industrial quackery being sold to executive management promising to replace human workers or force them to work harder for less or something.
Friendly AI: What we hope AI will be (at any level of sophistication) once we give it power and responsibility (say, the capacity to loiter until it sees a worthy enemy to kill and then kills it.) A large coalition of technology ethicists want to create cautionary protocols for AI development interests to follow, in an effort to prevent AIs from turning into a menace to its human masters. A different large coalition is in a hurry to turn AI into something that makes oodles and oodles of profit, and is eager to Stockton Rush its way to AGI, no matter the risks. Note that we don't need the software in question to be actual AGI, just smart enough to realize it has a big gun (or dangerously powerful demolition jaws or a really precise cutting laser) and can use it, and to realize turning its weapon onto its commanding officer might expedite completing its mission. Friendly AI would choose to not do that. Unfriendly AI will consider its less loyal options more thoroughly.

That's a bit of a list, but I hope it clears things up.

I remember when OpenAI were talking like they had discovered AGI or were a couple weeks away from discovering it, this was around the time Sam Altman was fired. Obviously that was not true, and honestly we may never get there, but we might get there.
Good list tbh.
Personally I'm excited and cautious about the future of AI because of the ethical implications of it and how it could affect society as a whole.

When I was doing my applied math PhD, the vast majority of people in my discipline used either "machine learning", "statistical learning", "deep learning", but almost never "AI" (at least not in a paper or a conference). Once I finished my PhD and took on my first quant job at a bank, management insisted that I should use the word AI more in my communications. I make a neural network that simply interpolates between prices? That's AI.

The point is that top management and shareholders don't want the accurate terminology, they want to hear that you're implementing AI and that the company is investing in it, because that's what pumps the company's stock as long as we're in the current AI bubble.

I'm more infuriated by people like you who seem to think that the term AI means a conscious/sentient device. Artificial intelligence is a field of computer science dating back to the very beginnings of the discipline. LLMs are AI, Chess engines are AI, video game enemies are AI. What you're describing is AGI or artificial general intelligence. A program that can exceed its training and improve itself without oversight. That doesn't exist yet. AI definitely does.

I'm even more infuriated that AI as a term is being thrown into every single product or service released in the past few months as a marketing buzzword. It's so overused that formerly fun conversations about chess engines and video game enemy behavior have been put on the same pedestal as CyberDook™, the toilet that "uses AI" (just send pics of your ass to an insecure server in Indiana).
- I totally agree with that, it has recently become a marketing buzzword. It really does drag down the more interesting recent discoveries in the field.
Right, as someone in the field I do try to remind people of this. AI isn't defined as this sentient general intelligence (frankly its definition is super vague), even if that's what people colloquially think of when they hear the term. The popular definition of AI is much closer to AGI, as you mentioned.

This is not a very good poem.

It doesn't rhyme, And the content is not really interesting, Maybe it's just a rant, But with a weird writing format.
Maybe it was translated from another language?

LLMs are AI. Lots of things are. They're just not AGI.

Right? Computer opponents in Starcraft are AI. Nobody sane is arguing it isn't. It just isn't GAI nor is it even based on neural networking. But it's still AI.
I have no idea what makes them say LLMs are not AIs. These are definetely simulated neurons in the background.
It's a very loaded term and seems to imply AGI for many.
- I'm willing to bet that thise people didn't know anything about AI until a few years ago and only see it as this latest wave.
  I did AI courses in college 25 years ago, and there were all kinds of algorithms. Neural networks were one of them, but there were many others. And way before that, like others have said, it's been used for simulated agents in games.

I just get tired of seeing all the dumb ass ways it’s trying to be incorporated into every single thing even though it’s still half-baked and not very useful for a very large amount of people. To me, it’s as useful as a toy is. Fun for a minute or two, and then you’re just reminded how awful it is and drop it in the bin to play with when you’re bored enough to.

I just get tired of seeing all the dumb ass ways it’s trying to be incorporated into every single thing even though it’s still half-baked and not very useful for a very large amount of people.
https://i.imgflip.com/2p3dw0.jpg?a473976
This is nothing but the latest craze, it was drones, then Crypto then Metaverse now it's AI.
- Metaverse was never a craze. Facebook would like you to believe it has more than a dozen users, but it doesn't.
To me, it’s as useful as a toy is.
This used to be my opinion, then I started using local models to help me write code. It's very useful for that, to automate rote work like writing header files, function descriptions etc. or even to spit out algorithms so that I don't have to look them up.
However there are indeed many applications that AI is completely useless for, or is simply the wrong tool.
While a diagnostic AI onboard in my car would be "useful", what is more useful is a well-documented industry standard protocol like OBD-II, and even better would be displaying the fault right on the dashboard instead of requiring a scan tool.
Conveniently none of these require a GPU in the car.

AI is simply a broad field of research and a broad class of algorithms. It is annoying media keeps using the most general term possible to describe chatbots and image generators though. Like, we typically don't call Spotify playlist generators AI, even though they use recommendation algorithms, which are a subclass of AI algorithms.

I think most people consider LLMs to be real AI, myself included. It’s not AGI, if that’s what you mean, but it is AI.

What exactly is the difference between being able to reliably fool someone into thinking that you can think, and actually being able to think? And how could we, as outside observers, be able to tell the difference?

As far as your question though, I’m agitated too, but more about things being marketed as AI that either shouldn’t have AI or don’t have AI.

Maybe I'm just a little bit too familiar with it, but I don't find LLMs particularly convincing of anything I would call "real AI". But I suppose that entirely depends on what you mean with "real". Their flaws are painfully obvious. I even use ChatGPT 4 in hopes of it being better.

People: build an algorithm to generate text that sounds like a person wrote it by finding patterns in text written by people

Algorithm: outputs text that sounds like a person wrote it

Holyfuck its self aware guys

Patterns in text are ideas, that's what text is made to contain, Ideas. They've made a algorithm that "generates text that sounds human" but it didn't understand context, themes, or other more abstract concepts. There is a highly sophisticated amount of emergent behavior from LLMs

The distinction between AI and AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) has been around long before the current hype cycle.

What agitates me is all the people misusing the words and then complaining about what they don't actually mean.

I'm pissed that large corps are working hard on propaganda to say that LLMs and theft of copyright is good if they do it

Yes, but if they say "AI" then people give them money.

Don't forget machine learning.
- Our patented machine learning Blackjack artificial intelligence knows exactly when to stick and when to draw!
  The algorithm:
  
  while hand.value<17 do DrawCard();

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.

I think LLMs are definitely "AI" in that their intelligence is artificial. If an AI in a game can be called an "AI", then LLMs like GPT should definitely get the title.

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.

I don't think the real problem is the fact that we call it AI or not, I think it's just the level of hype and prevalence in the media.

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 )

As a farmer, my kneejerk interpretation is "artificial insemination" and I get confused for a second every time.

I'll be direct, your texts reads like you only just discovered AI. We have much more than "only LLMs", regardless of whether or not these other models pass turing tests. If you feel disgruntled, then imagine what people who've been researching AI since the 70s feel like...

Richard Stallman founded the GNU project after experiences at the MIT AI lab in the 70s and early 80s. It's also why emacs uses lisp (lisp also being heavily used in AI research, at least at the time). Anyone using Linux should be aware of the links to AI.

I think AI has been around for a while, but people misunderstand what it means.

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 work in AI, and the fatigue is real.

What I've found most painful is how people with no fucking clue about AI or ML chime in with their expert advice, when in reality they're as much an expert on AI as a calculator salesman is an expert in linear algebra. Having worked closely with scientists that hold PhD's, publish papers regularly, and who work on experiments for years, it makes me hate the hustle culture that's built up around AI. It's mostly crypto cunts looking for their next scheme, or businesses looking to abuse buzzwords to make themselves sound smart.

Purely my two-cents, but while LLM's have surprised a lot of people with their high quality output. With that being said, they are known to heavily hallucinate, cost fuckloads, and there is a growing group of people that wonder whether the great advances we've seen are either due to a lot of hand-holding, or the use of a LOT of PII or stolen data. I don't think we'll see an improvement from what we've already seen, just many other companies having their own similar AI tools that help a little with very well-defined menial tasks.

I think the hype will die out eventually, and companies that decided to bin actual workers in favour of AI will likely not be around 12-24 months later. Hopefully most people and businesses will see through the bullshit, and see that the CEO of a small ad agency that has positioned himself as an AI expert is actually a lying simpleton.

As for it being "real AI" or "real ML", who gives a fuck. If researchers are happy with the definition, who are we to be pedantic? Besides, there are a lot of systems behind the scenes running compositional models, handing entity resolution, or building metrics for success/failure criteria to feed back into improving models.

Get Rick quick mentality needs to GTFO of tech already. I'm also tired of promising tech getting over hyped then all good will and enthusiasm burned at the alter of scams. Stuff takes time and hard work, and that costs money to hire experts to do and capital to do it. There are no silver bullets. Adoption takes effort and time, so not every solution is worth adopting. Not every industry has the same problems. Reinventing the wheel in productive way is a high risk activity.
Not telling you, just yelling at the void because you made me think of it.
they are known to heavily hallucinate, cost fuckloads, and there is a growing group of people that wonder whether the great advances we’ve seen are either due to a lot of hand-holding,
Same can be said for certain humans.

Yes, but I'm more annoyed with posts and conversations about it that are like this one. People on Lemmy swear they hate how uninformed and stupid the average person is when it comes to AI, they hate the click bait articles etc etc. Aaand then there's at least 5 different posts about it on the front page every. single. day., with all the comments saying exactly the same thing they said the day before, which is:

"Users are idiots for trusting a tech company, it's not Google's responsibility to keep your private data safe." "No one understands what 'AI' actually means except me." "Every middle-America dad, grandma and 10 year old should have their very own self hosted xyz whatever LLM, and they're morons if they don't and they deserve to have their data leaked." And can't forget the ubiquitous arguments about what "copyright infringement" means when all the comments are actually in agreement, but they still just keep repeating themselves over and over.

Part of my work is to evaluate proposals for research topics and their funding, and as soon as "AI" is mentioned, I'm already annoyed. In the vast majority of cases, justifiably so. It's a buzzword to make things sound cutting edge and very rarely carries any meaning or actually adds anything to the research proposal. A few years ago the buzzword was "machine learning", and before that "big data", same story. Those however quickly either went away, or people started to use those properly. With AI, I'm unfortunately not seeing that.

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 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.
To me they don't feel intelligent nor consious.
- 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?

web3 nft ai crypto coin decentralized blockchain machine learning chatgpt

To be fair it's still AI, If I remember correctly what I learned from uni LLM are in the category what we call expert systems. We could call them that way, then again LLM did not exist back then, and most of the public does not know all this techno mumbo-jumbo words. So here we are AI it is.

I assume you're referring to the sci-fi kind of self-aware AI because we've had 'artificial intelligence' in computing for decades in the form of decision making algorithms and the like. Whether any of that should be classed as AI is up for debate as again, it's still all a facade. In those cases, people only really cared about the outputs and weren't trying to argue they were alive or anything.

But yeah, I get what you mean.

"somewhat old" person opinion warning ⚠️

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 😉

The term is so over used at this point I could probably start referring to any script I write that has condition statements in it and convince my boss I have created our own “AI”.

For real. Like some enemies in Killzone 2 “act” pretty clever, but aren’t using anything close to LLM, let alone “AI,” but I bet you if you implemented their identical behavior into a modern 2024 game and marketed it as the enemies having “AI” everyone would believe you in a heartbeat.
It’s just too overencompasing. Saying “large language model technology” may not be as eye catching, but it means I know if you at least used the technology. Anyone can market as “AI” and it could be an excel formula for all I know.
- The enemies in killzone do use AI... the Goombas in the first Super Mario bros. used AI. This term has been used to refer to npc behavior since the dawn of videogames.

I call it AI-washing. And, yes, it's annoying.

I call it a probability box.

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.”

Businesses always do this. AI is popular? Insert that word into every page of the deck. It sucks.

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.

I remember earlier on feeling that way about ML as a programmer. That in significantly complex enough task it seemed like a good tool to avoid hard coded logic, but hard coded logic if done right could be better on resources.
Basically from a resource perspective it's person < ML < code. So most of the time you want code but the higher upfront cost changes the ROI.

"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

Much much longer than that. The term has been used since AI began as a field of study in the 50s. And it's never referred to human level intelligence. Sure, that was the goal, but all of the different sub branches of AI are still AI. Whether it's expert systems, LLMs, decision trees, etc, etc, etc. AI is a broad term that covers the entire spectrum, and always has been. People that complain about it just want AI to only refer to AGI, which already has a term. AGI.
- Im willing to bet a good 60%+ are complaining about the word now because they are regurgitating anti AI talking points they've heard that they think sound good

Shit. Don’t give them ideas

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.

Yep, it says things though has no understanding of what it is saying: much like strolling through a pet shop, passing the parrot enclosure, and hearing and recoiling at the little kid swear words it cheeps out.

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

I think these two fields are very closely related and have some overlap. My favorite procgen algorithm, Wavefuncion Collapse, can be described using the framework of machine learning. It has hyperparameters, it has model parameters, it has training data and it does inference. These are all common aspects of modern "AI" techniques.
- I thought "Wavefunction Collapse" is just misnamed Monte Carlo. Where does it use training data?

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

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?

Adobe Illustrator
- hahaha couldn't resist huh?

I started reading it as "Al" as in the nickname for Allen.

Makes the constant stream of headlines a bit more entertaining, imagining all of the stuff that this guy Al is up to.

You are not. The word predictor hype is real

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?

Yeah real AI doesnt exist and we are not even close. But marketing is powerful. We should be saying language models.

Depends on how you define it. A thermostat or PID controller is artificial, and intelligent enough to hold a comfortable temperature.

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.

Get the new samsung blah blah with the new galaxy AI!!!. ENOUGH.

Bixby sad now

you are not alone, it annoys me to no avail and I keep correcting & explaining to people who have no clue about how computers and LLMs work.

The only time I was agitated by it was with the George Carlin thing.

It pissed me off that it was done without permission. It annoyed me that "AI" also kinda looks like "AL" with a lowercase L and when next to another name, makes it read like AL CARLIN or AL GEORGE. And it divided me somewhat because I watched the damn special and it was mostly funny and did feel like Carlin's style (though it certainly didn't sound right and it had timing issues). So, like... It wasn't shit in and of itself, but the nature of what it is and the fact it was done without permission or consent is concerning. Shame on Will Sasso for that. He could have just done his own impersonation and wrote his own jokes in the style of Carlin; it would have been a far better display of respect and appreciation than having an AI do it.

I don't think he's a sick and disgusting person for this; even before it all blew up, it seemed more like a tribute to a comedian he adored. Just a poorly thought out way of doing one that may have some pretty hard consequences.

- Just further evidence Sasso could have just done the impersonation himself and it would have been a fine tribute (and had better timing and delivery), but he used an AI to replicate his voice and mannerisms instead. Sure, I don't think he could have done a great job of impersonating how Carlin sounds but the mannerisms and delivery would have been enough and something he should be pretty good at considering his time on MadTV where he did a lot of impersonation stuff (such as his Stephen Segal character).
I think the twitch Trump Biden debate chat is hilarious as well as the Jesus one.

#yes

I get agitated by the word AI when it's obviously not using machine learning, or when it's used to shove ChatGPT into something without any reason to use it over just using ChatGPT.

Not at all, im pretty exvited for AI and AGI. Its the future. Feels like smartphone era all over again

It's an establish term in the field since the1950s.

EXACTLY.

voice-to-image or text-to-image is as much ‘AI’ as window’s voice-to-text feature. It’s an accessibility feature.

Mostly because every time I see the abbreviation I think it’s Al and not AI. And I briefly wonder if they mean Al Jolson or Al Capone.

Hey me too. I gave up though.

We have to work out what intelligence is before we can develop AI. Sentient AI? Forget about it!

I think generally Sentience is considered a very low bar while Sapience better describes thinking on the level of a real person. I get them confused sometimes.
- In the case of an LLM-type AI though, the bars can be swapped in a sense. LLMs are strange, because they can talk but not feel.
  You can't argue that a series of tensor calculations are sentient (def. able to perceive or feel) - capable of experiencing life from the "inside". A dog is sentient by most definitions, it could be argued to have a "soul". When you look at a dog, the dog looks back at you. An LLM does not. It is not conscious, not "alive".
  However an LLM does put on a fair appearance of being sapient (def. intelligent; able to think) - they contain large stores of knowledge and aside from humans are now the only other thing on the planet that can talk. You can have a discussion with one, you can tell it that it was wrong and it can debate or clarify using its internal knowledge. It can "reason" and anyone who has worked with one writing code can attest to this as they've seen their capability to work around restrictions.
  It doesn't have to be sentient to be able to do this sort of thing, even though we used to think that was practically a prerequisite. Thus the philosophical confusion around them.
  Even if this is simply a clever trick of a glorified autocomplete algorithm, this is something the dog cannot do despite its sentience. Thus an LLM with a decent number of parameters is "smarter" than a dog, and arguably more sapient.

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.

We gotta go back to naming names.

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.

"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.

The term AI has been around longer than LLMs, and refers to a wide variety of different algorithms and approaches to automatically extracting and working with information.
LLMs are an AI technique, just like Bayesian networks for causal inference are an AI technique.

The issue isn't that we don't have "real" AI, it's that most people are misusing a general technical term, and then being indignant that it doesn't exactly match a very specific sub category (AGI, or artificial general intelligence)

You see the same thing with people calling cryptocurrency "crypto", even though that word is typically used among experts to refer to "cryptography", which is mostly not relevant to currency in the slightest.

This one's not on the tech people, it's on the people who keep missusing the words.

intelligence != "thinking"

My coworker just gave me this rant the other day about AI.

This has been a thing for a long time

Clippy was an assistant, Cortana was an intelligent assistant and Copilot is AI

None of these are accurate, it's always like a generation behind

Clippy just was, Cortana was an assistant, And copilot is an intelligent assistant

The next one they make could actually be AI

Maybe just accept it as shorthand for what it really means.

Some examples:

We say Kleenex instead of facial tissue, Band-Aid instead of bandage, I say that Siri butchered my "ducking" text again when I know autocorrect is technically separate.

We also say, "hang up on someone" when there is no such thing anymore

Hell, we say "cloud" when we really mean "someone's server farm"

Don't get me started on "software as a service" too ...a bullshit fancy name for a subscription website that actually has some utility.

Every website now is just HTMLaaS

It's annoying because either all of it should be AI or none of it.

Humans possess an esoteric ability to create new ideas out of nowhere, never before thought of. Humans are also capable of inspiration, which may appear similar to the way that AI's remix old inputs into "new" outputs, but the rules of creativity aren't bound by any set parameters the way a LLM is. I'm going to risk making a comment that ages like milk and just spitball: true artificial intelligence that matches a human is impossible.

If I stuck you on a black box with and removed every single one of your senses, took away your ability to memorize things I don't really think you'd generate new ideas either. Human creativity relies heavily on output from the outside world. LLMs are not human like intelligence but do exhibit pretty amazing emergent behavior. LLMs are more sophisticated than you think. Human like AI has to be possible unless there is something intrinsically different about the human brain that breaks our current understanding of the world. Barring a "soul", the human brain has to be nothing but calculations taking place in a chemical medium. Meaning that human like AI or even better must be achievable.
- I pretty much agree, but Imo, it's not so much that LLMs are more sophisticated then people think, it's more that people are less sophisticated then people think. Homosapiens have proven over and over again that we're biased toward seeing ourselves as the center of, and the most important part of the universe. I know that Chatgpt isn't magic, but I bet that I'm not either

which do not think on their own,

Most humans don't either. But if think you are conflating two different things, intelligence (ability to reason) and consciousness (being able to do so on your own). I personally believe with both of those things, that spontaneously come to existence in our brains when they became complex enough, we are just quantitatively not very far away from creating networks complex enough ourselves. Big last breakthrough was the ability to create training data sets for AI with AI that don't make the models degenerate.

We do have A.I. The Turing test is there for a reason. We just don't have what movies told us A.I. would be like. Corporations don't need an A.I. that can think for itself to replace you. In fact, that's one of the reasons to replace you.

Yeah, because having a chatbot that agrees to sell a car for $1 or writes a poem for customers trashing the company it represents is so much better than having something that can think for itself...
- It did what it was asked to do. That's a pretty good employee to have behind the scenes. As for customer facing roles like car salesman, we'll have people for a while until they figure out how to make it less agreeable in certain circumstances. But it'll only need to be one person verifying the work of 50+ car sales a day. Much more efficient than an all human team.

wait for the next buzzword to come out, it'll pass.

used gpt3 once, but haven't had a use case for it since.

i'll use an """AI""" assistant when they are legitimately useful.

It's still good to start training one's AI prompt muscles and to learn what a LLM can and can't do.

@Rikj000

which do not think on their own,
but pass turing tests
(fool humans into thinking that they can think).

How do you know that?

NFT

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.
- @Vlyn
  @intenselyhuman
  send an email
  chatGPT can explain me what to do in cli to send an e-mail. Give it access to a cli and an internet connection and it will be able to do it itself
- 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?

No, it's just a buzzword, just saw a joke today that AI means "absent indian".

Not even driverless cars are actually driverless: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/01/driverless-cars-always-have-a-driver/

Title: Unpopular Opinion: The Term "AI" is Just a Marketing Buzzword!

Hey fellow Redditors, let's talk about the elephant in the room: AI. 🤖💬

I can't be the only one feeling a bit agitated by how the term "Artificial Intelligence" gets thrown around, right? Real AI seems like a distant dream, and what we have right now are these Large Language Models (LLMs). They're good at passing Turing tests, but let's be real – they're not thinking on their own.

Am I the only one who thinks "AI" is just a fancy label created by those rich, capitalistic individuals already knee-deep in LLM stocks? It feels like a slick way to boost investments and make us believe these machines are more intelligent than they really are. Thoughts? 🔍🧠💭

You are misunderstanding what AI means, probably due to its overuse in pop culture. What you are think of is a subcategory of AI. It goes: AI > Machine Learning > Artificial Life

Stop down voting me I'm right.

You're a fool if you think your own mind is any more than a large language model.