Ask Lemmy

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 call it a probability box.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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?

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

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.

You are not. The word predictor hype is real

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.

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?

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.