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> It doesn't look like what people would think of as AI at all. If by “people” you mean specifically the subset of people who have technical knowledge or who r

> It doesn't look like what people would think of as AI at all. If by “people” you mean specifically the subset of people who have technical knowledge or who read HN, then sure, but in the wider population, anything that seems intelligent that’s fine by a computer is AI, they don’t care if it’s using statistical techniques, a random number generator or a bunch of conditionals. Laypeople don’t know or care what happens under the hood. I once heard a conversation between an old boss of mine and an investor where my boss was saying that the software did calculations X and Y automatically and the investor responded with “so it’s AI”. My thought was “wait what? No it’s not” but my boss said something like “AI is anything that people perceive as intelligence thats artificial”. Historically, exist systems were seen as AI and they weren’t necessarily statistics based. That’s why we have more technical terms like machine learning. But I agree, that laws should be far more specific about what they mean and “you can use a computer for this” would be better.m, if that’s what they really mean.

drtgh 3y ago
By such logic a company could call wood steam engines neutron-free nuclear fission engines, as they convert the water vapour into mechanical energy. It would be to change and/or to blend the properties of any technical word or concept freely, and legitimately, for to commerce, marketing promotion or any purpose. If generalized I guess it would promote and increase the misleading advertising cases exponentially. ( If I can humbly comment about what happened in the conversation you heard, it seems that your boss eluded an "it is not Machine Learning, it is better" and blended an answer for to avoid confronting or disappointing the investor some way )
- dkersten 3y ago
  I spoke to him about it after and he said something like: if it looks intelligent to the user, and it’s done by a computer, the user sees it as artificial intelligence, since they don’t care about the underlying tech that drives it. Just how startups often manually process the first few customers requests or get mechanical Turk to do something. Users just see the end result and don’t really know or care if it was implemented by a mess of if statements, machine learning, or magical fairy dust. They just see a machine acting in ways that seem intelligent. Of course that very much muddies and dilutes the terminology, but AI was always an imprecise and badly defined term and, as was pointed out, earlier AI techniques wouldn’t be seen as that nowadays: by todays standard, I wouldn’t consider expert systems or minmax tree search or whatever as AI, but once upon a time, when the term was coined, it certainly was.

drtgh 3y ago

By such logic a company could call wood steam engines neutron-free nuclear fission engines, as they convert the water vapour into mechanical energy. It would be to change and/or to blend the properties of any technical word or concept freely, and legitimately, for to commerce, marketing promotion or any purpose. If generalized I guess it would promote and increase the misleading advertising cases exponentially. ( If I can humbly comment about what happened in the conversation you heard, it seems that your boss eluded an "it is not Machine Learning, it is better" and blended an answer for to avoid confronting or disappointing the investor some way )

dkersten 3y ago
I spoke to him about it after and he said something like: if it looks intelligent to the user, and it’s done by a computer, the user sees it as artificial intelligence, since they don’t care about the underlying tech that drives it. Just how startups often manually process the first few customers requests or get mechanical Turk to do something. Users just see the end result and don’t really know or care if it was implemented by a mess of if statements, machine learning, or magical fairy dust. They just see a machine acting in ways that seem intelligent. Of course that very much muddies and dilutes the terminology, but AI was always an imprecise and badly defined term and, as was pointed out, earlier AI techniques wouldn’t be seen as that nowadays: by todays standard, I wouldn’t consider expert systems or minmax tree search or whatever as AI, but once upon a time, when the term was coined, it certainly was.