As the AI market continues to balloon, experts are warning that its VC-driven rise is eerily similar to that of the dot com bubble.
Except for all intents and purposes that people keep talking about it, it’s simply not. It’s not about technicalities, it’s about how most people are freaking confused. If most people are freaking confused, then by god do we need to re-categorize and come up with some new words.
“Artificial intelligence” is well-established technical jargon that’s been in use by researchers for decades. There are scientific journals named “Artificial Intelligence” that are older than I am.
If the general public is so confused they can come up with their own new name for it. Call them HALs or Skynets or whatever, and then they can rightly say “ChatGPT is not a Skynet” and maybe it’ll calm them down a little. Changing the name of the whole field of study is just not in the cards at this point.
Never really understood the gatekeeping around the phrase “AI”. At the end of the day the general study itself is difficult to understand for the general public. So shouldn’t we actually be happy that it is a mainstream term? That it is educating people on these concepts, that they would otherwise ignore?
If you haven’t noticed, the people we’re arguing with— including the pope and James Cameron— are people who think this generative pseudo-AI and a Terminator are the same thing. But they’re not even remotely similar, or remotely-similarly capable. That’s the problem. If you want to call them both “AI”, that’s technically semantics. But as far as pragmatics goes, generative AI is not intelligent in any capacity; and calling it “AI” is one of the most confusion-causing things we’ve done in the last few decades, and it can eff off.
The researchers who called it AI were not the ones who are the source of the confusion. They’ve been using that term for this kind of thing for more than half a century.
I think what’s happening here is that people are panicking, realizing that this new innovation is a threat to their jobs and to the things they had previously been told were supposed to be a source of unique human pride. They’ve been told their whole lives that machines can’t replace that special spark of human creativity, or empathy, or whatever else they’ve convinced themselves is what makes them indispensable. So they’re reduced to arguing that it’s just a “stochastic parrot”, it’s not “intelligent”, not really. It’s just mimicking intelligence somehow.
Frankly, it doesn’t matter what they call it. If they want to call it a “stochastic parrot” that’s just mindlessly predicting words, that’s probably going to make them feel even worse when that mindless stochastic parrot is doing their job or has helped put out the most popular music or create the most popular TV show in a few years. But in the meantime it’s just kind of annoying how people are demanding that we stop using the term “artificial intelligence” for something that has been called that for decades by the people who actually create these things.
Rather than give in to the ignorant panic-mongers, I think I’d rather push back a bit. Skynet is a kind of artificial intelligence. Not all artificial intelligences are skynets. It should be a simple concept to grasp.
We should call them LLMAIs (la-mize, like llamas) to really specify what they are.
And to their point, I think the ‘intelligence’ in the modern wave of AI is severely lacking. There is no reasoning or learning, just a brute force fuzzy training pass that remains fixed at a specific point in time, and only approximates what an intelligent actor would respond with through referencing massive amounts of “correct response” data. I’ve heard AGI being bandied about as the thing people really thought when you said AI a few years ago, but I’m kind of hoping the AI term stops being watered down with this nonsense. ML is ML, it’s wrong to say that it’s a subset of AI when AI has its own separate connotations.
LLaMA models are already a common type of large language model.
but I’m kind of hoping the AI term stops being watered down with this nonsense.
I’m hoping people will stop mistaking AI for AGI and quit complaining about how it’s not doing what they imagined that they were promised it would do. I also want a pony.
The real problem is folks who know nothing about it weighing in like they’re the world’s foremost authority. You can arbitrarily shuffle around definitions and call it “Poo Poo Head Intelligence” if you really want, but it won’t stop ignorance and hype reigning supreme.
To me, it’s hard to see what cowtowing to ignorance by “rebranding” this academic field would achieve. Throwing your hands up and saying “fuck it, the average Joe will always just find this term too misleading, we must use another” seems defeatist and even patronizing. Seems like it would instead be better to try to ensure that half-assed science journalism and science “popularizers” actually do their jobs.
