Did the word "AI" just lost all meaning?
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by Blender Dumbass
Aka: J.Y. Amihud. A Jewish by blood, multifaceted artist with experience in film-making, visual effects, programming, game development, music and more. A philosopher at heart. An activist for freedom and privacy. Anti-Paternalist. A user of Libre Software. Speaking at least 3 human languages. The writer and director of the 2023 film "Moria's Race" and the lead developer of it's game sequel "Dani's Race".
AI ( Artificial Intelligence ) just a few decades ago meant a robot or a computer that has human-like thinking. Think of HAL 9000, or the robots in I Robot. All of those things were "AI". ↩ Reply
Today any remotely automatic algorithm on the planet is labeled with this nonsensical term. ↩ Reply
LLMs ( Large Language Models ) are just statistical analysis algorithms. Yes, they are quite clever, and quite complex. But in the end of the day, they are mathematical statistics predictors. There were words for this sort of things. We used to call it "Statistics" or "Analytics". But now it's called "AI". ↩ Reply
Same thing is happening with different uses of applied mathematical Analytics, like automatic generation of images ( that statistically satisfy the description "prompt" ). This is also a clever way to do "Statistics". Why are we calling it "AI"? ↩ Reply
I get calling LLMs AI to some extent. They are very similar ( to the uninitiated ) to the way AI is portrayed in the sci-fi stories that I started this article with. But why are we calling image generation algorithms "AI"? ↩ Reply
In a way, it seems like every remotely automatic algorithm now-a-days is "AI". Is it a marketing gimmick to make people care? To make people notice? Are all those renamings of everything into "AI" just an attempt to hop-on the hype wave of bullshit? ↩ Reply
Let's think about it. Analytics. Hm... ↩ Reply
"AI" seems to still be closely related to anything machine learning. LLMs are not algorithms carefully assembled by linguists to "understand" the promps. And the answers the LLMs are giving are not carefully put together information curated by the experts or at least people that know a thing or two about the topics in question. That would be Wikipedia, not LLMs. ↩ Reply
Instead LLMs are algorithms that analyze large quantities of text to pick up on patterns. How much this or that word, or this or that letter, is used in this or that context? And then, given enough source data, the algorithm will be able to "randomly assemble" an amalgamation of letters in sequence that statistically speaking appear to belong in the source data. ↩ Reply
Image generators and alike seem to to do the same thing. But instead of letters in sequence they are an analysis of pixels on a 2D plane. ↩ Reply
It seems like instead of actually trying to figure out and solve the issue of language, making a very robust, very useful clever algorithm, the developers of AI decided to cleverly cheat the system. Bypassing the hard work, by offloading everything to an algorithm. ↩ Reply
That in the end of the day yielded a yet another algorithm. An algorithm that can pretend very convincingly to be able to solve a problem. And algorithm, that poetically people started using whenever they don't want to actually solve a problem themselves. ↩ Reply
Think about it. When you ask an LLM to perform a "thinking" for you, to "solve" something for you, you are not solving it yourself. You are cheating. But the ironic thing is, the LLM itself is cheating too, because the engineers who designed it didn't want to solve the problem themselves. They wanted a computer to statistically arrive at an algorithm by itself. ↩ Reply
There is not just no intelligence in the LLM. But no intelligence in the creation of the LLM in the first place. If there is any intelligence in it, it is just pretend intelligence, Artificial Intelligence. ↩ Reply
Wait... ↩ Reply
So, given this logic, "AI" is the best term to describe this madness? Hm... ↩ Reply
I get it now. "AI" does not refer to the algorithm used. "AI" ( Artificial Intelligence ) is the term that describes its users. ↩ Reply
Happy Hacking!!! ↩ Reply
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TheTootingTitan
c:0What if a word's true meaning never quite disappeared, but merely went dormant, waiting for the right moment to bloom again?
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