this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2023
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[–] BoastfulDaedra@lemmynsfw.com 138 points 2 years ago (8 children)

We really need to stop calling things "AI" like it's an algorithm. There's image recognition, collective intelligence, neural networks, path finding, and pattern recognition, sure, and they've all been called AI, but functionally they have almost nothing to do with each other.

For computer scientists this year has been a sonofabitch to communicate through.

[–] CeeBee@lemmy.world 59 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (38 children)

But "AI" is the umbrella term for all of them. What you said is the equivalent of saying:

we really need to stop calling things "vehicles". There's cars, trucks, airplanes, submarines, and space shuttles and they've all been called vehicles, but functionally they have almost nothing to do with each other

All of the things you've mentioned are correctly referred to as AI, and since most people do not understand the nuances of neural networks vs hard coded algorithms (and anything in-between), AI is an acceptable term for something that demonstrates results that comes about from a computer "thinking" and making ~~shaved~~ intelligent decisions.

Btw, just about every image recognition system out there is a neural network itself or has a neural network in the processing chain.

Edit: fixed an autocorrect typo

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[–] lolcatnip@reddthat.com 35 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I think you're fighting a losing battle.

[–] Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world 15 points 2 years ago (4 children)

You're right, but so is the previous poster. Actual AI doesn't exist yet, and when/if it does it's going to confuse the hell out of people who don't get the hype over something we've had for years.

But calling things like machine learning algorithms "AI" definitely isn't going away... we'll probably just end up making a new term for it when it actually becomes a thing... "Digital Intelligence" or something. /shrug.

[–] tegs_terry@feddit.uk 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It isn't human-level, but you could argue it's still intelligence of a sort, just erstatz

[–] OpenStars@kbin.social 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I dunno... I've heard that argument, but when something gives you >1000 answers, among which the correct answer might be buried somewhere, and a human is paid to dig through it and return something that looks vaguely presentable, is that really "intelligence", of any sort?

Aka, 1 + 1 = 13, which is a real result that AI can and almost certainly has recently offer(ed).

People are right to be excited about the potential that generative AI offers in the future, but we are far from that atm. Also it is vulnerable to misinformation presented in the training data - though some say that that process might even affect humans too (I know, you are shocked, right? well, hopefully not that shocked:-P).

Oh wait, nevermind I take it all back: I forgot that Steven Huffman / Elon Musk / etc. exist, and if that is considered intelligence, then AI has definitely passed that level of Turing equivalence, so you're absolutely right, erstatz it is, apparently!?

[–] tegs_terry@feddit.uk 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

What's the human digging through answers thing? I haven't heard anything about that.

[–] OpenStars@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago (4 children)

ChatGPT was caught, and I think later admitted, to not actually using fully automated processes to determine those answers, iirc. Instead, a real human would curate the answers first before they went out. That human might reject answers to a question like "Computer: what is 1+1?" ten times before finally accepting one of the given answers ("you're mother", hehe with improper apostrophe intact:-P). So really, when you were asking for an "AI answer", what you were asking was another human on the other end of that conversation!!!

Then again, I think that was a feature for an earlier version of the program, that might no longer be necessary? On the other hand, if they SAY that they aren't using human curation, but that is also what they said earlier before they admitted that they had lied, do we really believe it? Watch any video of these "tech Bros" and it's obvious in less than a minute - these people are slimy.

And to some extent it doesn't matter bc you can download some open source AI programs and run them yourself, but in general from what I understand, when people say things nowadays like "this was made from an AI", it seems like it is always a hand-picked item from among the set of answers returned. So like, "oooh" and "aaaahhhhh" and all that, that such a thing could come from AI, but it's not quite the same thing as simply asking a computer for an answer and it returning the correct answer right away! "1+1=?" giving the correct answer of 13 is MUCH less impressive when you find that out of a thousand attempts at asking, it was only returned a couple times. And the situation gets even worse(-r) when you find out that ChatGPT has been getting stupider(-est?) for awhile now - https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2023/07/ai-supposed-become-smarter-over-time-chatgpt-can-become-dumber/388826/.

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[–] sukhmel@programming.dev 4 points 2 years ago

This problem was kinda solved by adding AGI term meaning "AI but not what is now AI, what we imagined AI to be"

Not going to say that this helps with confusion much 😅 and to be fair, stuff like autocomplete in office soft was called AI long time ago but it was far from LLMs of now

[–] Klear@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 years ago

Enemies in Doom have AI. We've been calling simple algorythms in a handful lines of code AI for a long time, the trend has nothing to do with languege models etc.

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[–] OpenStars@kbin.social 22 points 2 years ago

AI = "magic", or like "synergy" and other buzzwords that will soon become bereft of all meaning as a result of people abusing it.

[–] CobblerScholar@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago

There's whole countries that refer to the entire internet itself as Facebook, once something takes root it ain't going anywhere

[–] schmidtster@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Shouldn’t there be a catch all term to explain the broader scope of the specifics?

Science is a broad term for multiple different studies, vehicle is a broad term for cars and trucks.

[–] can@sh.itjust.works 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)
[–] TheGreenGolem@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Glorified chatbots. Tops. But definitely not something with any kind of intelligence.

[–] ParetoOptimalDev@lemmy.today 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Yesterday I prompted gpt4 to convert a power shell script to Haskell. It did it in one shot. This happens more and more frequently for me.

I don't want to oversell llms, but you are definitely underselling them.

[–] schmidtster@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Is that not a type of AI already?

[–] sukhmel@programming.dev 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Well, there's an argument over not calling machine learning AI in this very thread, so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[–] schmidtster@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago

So why suggest it for the catch all term for AI when it’s only one portion of the argument itself? Such a strange suggestion,

[–] danielbln@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Language is fluid, and there is plenty of terminology that is dumb or imprecise to someone in the field, but A-ok to the wider populace. "Cloud" is also not actually a formation of water droplets, but someone's else's datacenter, but to some people the cloud is everything from Gmail to AWS.

If I say AI today and most people associate the same thing with it (these days that usually means generative AI , i.e. mostly diffusion or transformer models) then that's fine for me. Call it Plumbus for all I care.

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[–] DarkNightoftheSoul@mander.xyz 1 points 2 years ago

Those are all very specific intelligences. The goal is to unite them all under a so-called general intelligence. You're right, that's the dream, but there are many steps along the way that are fairly called intelligence.

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