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Arguing what is and isn't AI is kinda futile, since there's no solid definition. I remember some old footage I once found on YouTube of a very primitive automat
by Unai 3y ago
Arguing what is and isn't AI is kinda futile, since there's no solid definition. I remember some old footage I once found on YouTube of a very primitive automated system for an airport control tower (I think it was). I don't remember the year, but probably the 70's or so. The guy was calling it AI. Then went into detail about what the software was doing, even showing the code (maybe it was just the interface). It literally was just a whole lot of if/else statements. Once we get used to ChatGPT and the like, it will either stop being called AI or we will start talking more broadly about "General artificial intelligence" for the next thing to come.
Until recently I was on the side of not calling anything AI if it wasn't GAI, but honestly... who cares? Words are just tools to communicate ideas; if most people want to call the things we are doing today AI, that's ok, and it isn't even wrong. It isn't sentient, but it is arguably intelligent by some standards, and it is obviously artificial. If we understand each other, that's good enough.
- slowmovintarget 3y ago> but honestly... who cares? Words are just tools to communicate ideas That's the problem. If definitions constantly shift, then the signal-to-noise ration is much higher. It means that we no longer have an efficient way of conveying meaning. In engineering and science, terminology has to have very specific meanings, or the words become unusable for reasoning. The idea that "pffft... whatever... words... am-I-right?" seems to come from the angle of post-facto justification of using incorrect terminology, or as a mechanism for gas-lighting people into believing something that has little foundation in the real world. This is something advertisers and politicians are constantly striving to do. I really hate that this has leaked into technology discussions, but here we are.