Stop Saying AI

https://connermccall.com/blog/2024/03/13/stop-saying-ai/

by sloped • 2 years ago

26 46 2 years ago

jncfhnb2• 2 years ago

Sentient Source is more alliterative.

simonw3• 2 years ago

Artificial Intelligence is the name of the research field that this stuff comes out of. It was coined in 1956: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_workshop

Researchers have been using "AI" as a term to describe their work for nearly 70 years at this point.

I don't see why we should throw away six decades of nomenclature just because "LLMs aren't actually intelligent".

It's a perfectly cromulent term.

qeternity• 2 years ago

cromulent

Thanks for the new word of the day!

glitchcrab• 2 years ago

One could argue that it is not actually a word https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/what-does-cromulent...

jampekka5• 2 years ago

The term "Artificial Intelligence" was explictly not used in these fields for long stretches of time because the term got overhyped. The winter is coming.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

hnenjoyer_93• 2 years ago

A new winter is never coming, the last few years have shown the potential of machine learning and its use is only going to increase

simonw3• 2 years ago

Do you have any further reading on the idea that the term was explicitly avoided in those fields as a result of the AI winter?

I thought the academics kept on using the term, while commercial interests backed away during winter and came rushing back as soon as it was fashionable again.

iainctduncan2• 2 years ago

And we have had numerous cycles of things that were once referred to as AI being no longer referred to as such...

CharlesW5• 2 years ago

But that's an indicator of success, not failure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

"AI is whatever hasn't been done yet." — Larry Tesler

jchw• 2 years ago

I fully agree and also try to correct myself and use terms like "LLM" and "generative image models" as I really do feel the term "AI" is misleading at best... That said, I can't help but feel the cat is firmly out of the bag. Of course people have been calling lots of things AI for a long time, so this is nothing particularly new. I think we're just going to have to live with it.

jampekka5• 2 years ago

I use a heuristic that if somebody says "AI", they don't know what they are talking about or are pandering to those who don't.

CharlesW5• 2 years ago

Or, they're referring to the entire class of computer science.

farts_mckensy• 2 years ago

To me, this is like asking if a hotdog is technically a sandwich. Who cares? It's semantics. This has the same vibe as, "Well, technically, Linux is just a kernel, not an operating system." No one cares, nerds. There's no point in trying to argue about this. People have adopted AI into their vernacular. It's not going to change at this point.

dreamglider2• 2 years ago

The few thousand of people (worldwide), who were into NLP (Natural Language Processing) and were the drive behind the ML "revolution" - they care, but for other reasons. In like 10 years from now, when you ask for a hotdog but get a sandwich - then you may care too. But hey - that's happening right now, with humans, anyway ! :D

bigyikes• 2 years ago

Stop saying AI?

But they are not intelligence and anyone who spends time with them quickly realizes they are just a very superpowered suggestion engine

How about: stop moving goalposts. These models are obviously capable of acts of intelligence. If you told someone 10 years ago about the things these models can do, they would tell you the model is intelligent. The model does well on human exams that we use to measure intelligence.

I get it, AI is a hype term, but to pretend that there is no intelligence is silly, and to pretend that you can redefine intelligence is hubris.

MarkusQ• 2 years ago

These models are obviously capable of acts of intelligence.

Except they aren't. They are capable of language and pattern manipulation, and really good at it. But if you concoct a novel problem that isn't found anywhere on the internet and confront them with it, they fail absurdly. Even if it's something that a kid could figure out.

The Eliza effect strikes again!

bryanlarsen• 2 years ago

But if you concoct a novel problem that isn't found anywhere on the internet and confront them with it, they fail absurdly.

Often they do, but sometimes they don't.

Even if it's something that a kid could figure out.

Intelligent and smart aren't synonyms. Modern LLM's are obviously pretty stupid at times, but even a human with an IQ of 65 has some intelligence.

jncfhnb2• 2 years ago

But if you concoct a novel problem that isn't found anywhere on the internet and confront them with it, they fail absurdly.

Can you give an example?

yongjik• 2 years ago

But when LLM answers a logic or math question that no seven-year-old would figure out, would you flip the table and say this is the evidence that the seven-year-old is not intelligent?

Otherwise, it sounds like circular reasoning, where we simply say "Of course a human being is intelligent because they are intelligent, and LLM is not because it isn't."

dreamglider2• 2 years ago

Stating that there are "acts of intelligence" is not even wrong. Sorry, not an opinion, a fact. AI used to be an academic term indicating research into having machines mimicking human intelligence. Machine Learning (a.k.a the current hype) is about pattern recognition and has precisely zero to do with AI and/or any form of intelligence whatsoever. A rat has more intelligence than an LLM and bees - for sure. It's not about pretending - it's about facts. This statement is true if we have a shared understanding of what 'intelligence' means.

basicallybones2• 2 years ago

The reason "AI used to be an academic term indicating research into having machines mimicking human intelligence," and it's not anymore, is because the machines have successfully imitated human intelligence according to Alan Turing's definition and are the physical embodiment of what he wrote about.

Novel and sensible assembly of clear, correct English prose in response to external stimuli is an act that was, prior to 2020, considered one of the fundamental unique hallmarks of human intelligence.

We do not have a shared understanding of what "intelligence" means. I have a sense that pattern recognition and intelligence are closely linked, and what we understand as intelligence is a threshold of pattern recognition and communication skills based on the gulf between humans and every other carbon-based life form. Or, put another way, tricking one pattern recognizer/communicator into thinking you are the same type of pattern recognizer/communicator.

CharlesW5• 2 years ago

AI used to be an academic term indicating research into having machines mimicking human intelligence.

This is the same misunderstanding that the author has. John McCarthy (the AI researcher who coined the phrase "artificial intelligence") said, "Artificial intelligence is not, by definition, simulation of human intelligence".

fngjdflmdflg2• 2 years ago

Not a comment on if AI if AI or not but pattern recognition is intelligence. Or perhaps more strictly something that has general pattern recognition capabilities. But in any case pattern recognition and intelligence are very closely related (perhaps the same thing), so saying that AI is "just" pattern recognition doesn't seem like a good counter argument. The argument then has to be about how much pattern recognition an entity has for it to be intelligent or how general it's pattern recognition capabilities are.

nbow• 2 years ago

I somewhat agree here, but not entirely. I think that in technical conversations it's much better to say llm, diffusion model, transformer, etc. But overall it's all Latin to the layman anyway. The use of AI as a marketing term is what I think is causing OP frustration, it's being marked as a panacea when it's far from it, but when is it ever? Social media was marketed as a life changing good for society too.

Any conversation about AGI, does make me cringe. What an absolutely silly and moonshot thing to be having discussions about.

OkayPhysicist• 2 years ago

Artificial Intelligence has nothing to do with the capabilities, and everything to do with the approach. If I hand-crafted an algorithm that could reliably spot stop signs in pictures by applying a mountain of heuristics that I came up with, AI would not be an appropriate label. If I instead made a program that could detect stop signs after being fed thousands of pictures of stop signs, then I'm comfortable calling that machine learning, or AI, because the approach was based off modelling intelligence, i.e., the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.

jampekka5• 2 years ago

The former was the original use for "AI". The latter was called "machine learning" largely to contrast it with "AI" whose reputation had tanked due to hype.

matrss• 2 years ago

I find it useful to keep in mind that LLMs are essentially "just" random generators based on the probability distribution of some language (or more accurately a sample of that distribution in the form of a finite amount of text, a dataset).

You don't expect a random generator to spit out facts, you expect to get random nonsense. But it can be very good at replicating the fitted probability distribution in its output, i.e. generate convincingly coherent language.

panqueca• 2 years ago

We could can: Probabilistic Next Token Caulculator

paxys• 2 years ago

But they are not intelligence and [...]

Yes, and that is why the "artificial" qualifier is used. Artificial sugar is not sugar. Artificial flowers aren't flowers. That's the entire point of the term.

AI as a field deals with teaching computers to approximate human intelligence. The term has been used since the 60s, and isn't going to change because random people are throwing online tantrums.

_xivi• 2 years ago

Except only those working in the field are familiar with the historical context and "AI as a field from the 60s".

The public only see the advertisements. Are we really going to blame the victims and tell them, of course it's not intelligent, you dumbass, why did you trust its answer? you shouldn't have fallen for our marketing.

wilg• 2 years ago

Bikeshedding about terminology isn't worth anybody's time. You can be skeptical of technology without grandstanding about it for social clout.

golol• 2 years ago

So AI = AGI, I see.

jantissler• 2 years ago

Probably only true until we achieve AGI, because then it has to be ASI at minimum. I wonder at what point the goal posts can't be moved anymore. Or will we always find some creative way to distance ourselves? I think sometimes this topic scares people so much they immediately get into denial mode.

And I'm not saying AGI is near. I have actually no idea if we need to wait for another breakthrough to enable that or not.

But it's still obvious that “true AI“ is for some people always what computers can't do yet.

Stop Saying AI

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