Almost half of Canadians know little to nothing about AI: survey

Who can blame them when the industry itself misrepresents its product, starting with the name.

It's SELF reported "knowing little to nothing".
As a computer scientist, I can confidently say that most people who confidently say they are well versed in the subject, actually still know little to nothing.
You're providing a prime example of misunderstanding. The term AI has been in professional use for a wide variety of algorithms, including machine learning and neural nets like LLMs, since the Dartmouth conference in 1956. It's the people who only know what AI is like from Star Trek and other such sources that are misinformed.
- As a programmer intimately familiar with LLMs and training evaluation... would you mind if I rephrased your comment to "How dare you use the common meaning of our obscure industry jargon that's mostly just marketing bullshit anyways!"
  The ship for "What does AI mean?" has fucking sailed. AI is an awful term that, in my experience, is vanishingly rarely used by developers outside of "Robots that will kill us" and "Marketing bullshit" th3 term needs to die - it implies something much closer to "AGI in a mechasuit with miniguns" rather than "My python code can recognize fuzzy numbers!"
- You're technically correct, but these products are marketed as though they were like Star Trek's computer. Do you think it's a coincidence that Google Assistant's codename was "Project Majel"?

Almost half of Canadians know little about Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS, Linux, tcp/ip networking, file formats, disk partitioning, encryption, SSL certificates...

There are a thousand things that Canadians SHOULD know about before they even think about 'AI'.

Orrrr how electricity works, how to do an oil change on a car, etc. Nobody can know everything so I think the article title is kinda stupid.
Problem is people treat their computers and programs exactly like they treat their cars ... as long as it starts and goes they don't care. But when there's a problem all hell breaks loose.
Companies do the same thing, putting less importance on IT depts than stock buy backs.

And the rest overestimate how much they know.

Yup came to comment this. The number is certainly more than half. Second line:
More than two in five (43%) of Canadians say they know very little or nothing about the topic, reports TECHNATION.
This is just self-reported.

To any Canadians who don't know - it's marketing bullshit. Taco Bell talking about the "crunch factor" of their latest creation is more meaningful than some company saying "We do it with AI now."

Idk if I understand AI. By AI does it mean it can think and not a glorified if-else statement? Is AI different from machine learning? Idk man.

When people talk about AI, they're generally referring to systems or machines that can perform tasks which typically require human intelligence. These tasks might include things like recognizing speech, translating languages, or making decisions. AI isn't about simulating human consciousness or emotions but about replicating the ability to perform specific intelligent tasks.
AI systems can range from simple, rule-based algorithms (which might seem like glorified if-else statements) to complex, learning systems. This is where machine learning comes in. Machine learning is actually a subset of AI. It's a way of achieving AI where the system learns from data. Instead of being explicitly programmed to perform a task, the system is given huge amounts of data and learns patterns or rules from it. Over time, it can make predictions or decisions based on what it has learned.
So, not all AI is machine learning, but all machine learning is AI. Hope this clears things up a bit!
- In that case, what's an instance of AI that doesn't utilize machine learning?

“Fancy query”

Almost half of Canadians know little to nothing

probably the most accurate thing I have read all day

The headline missed a few critical words.

Almost half of Canadians realize they know little to nothing about AI. The rest are deluded.

I could be charitable and say that 0.01% of Canadians know something about AI, but I'm probably overestimating by leaps and bounds.

I've been playing with these 'AI' tools, and I've gone from 'hey cool' to 'useless git' in about 3 months.
It's a neat trick, but it's not intelligence; and too many people - especially suits - don't seem to get that. It's gonna be fun watching them Broadcom themselves into a smoking ruin.

Oh well look at that. I thought it was just a new way to spell "eh" ai.

I've been making a game as a hobby. The more I learn to program the more I see AI is great at simple tasks like spellchecker. But needs fuel(other people's work) to do anything. On top of that if you ask it 2+2 it's going to run every addition statement in existence to determine the best route to 2+2.