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Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying
(www.thenerve.news)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Part of the problem is AI isn’t a literal thing with a fixed definition. It’s more of a marketing term that translates into “I want you to buy this thing”. So some things are considered AI that are legitimately useful and others are not and then there’s the debate if wether it’s because it really is AI or if it is and AI just sucks.
This quote is quite funny in this context, because it's literally what people do with AI. Half of the frontpage of lemmy is AI. The other half is people saying AI is bad with no realization of the irony, because they don't see good AI. It's like CGI. Everybody hates CGI, except they don't. CGI is everywhere. They just hate bad CGI.
What is AI? Explain as if i just woke up from a coma. We don’t have flying cars, we have dumpster deloreans, but everyone is talking about AI. What is it?
AI is a vague term used colloquially to describe a variety of dissimilar and unrelated technologies each carrying a unique mixture of pros and cons.
So it doesn’t actually mean anything.
Like most things, meaning depends on context. In the most common context of “news about AI” we’re talking about generative AI: image/video generators, LLMs, and to a lesser degree coding assistants. If you want to know more about what these technologies share in common, look up what a “perceptron” is and how it works.
More generally AI could mean anything from a neural network based approach to problem solving, to a completely deterministic, hand coded heuristic. A pure decision tree could be AI in the case of video game NPCs, for example.
So it’s a new synonym for algorithm.
Not quite. Algorithms are definite, you get the same guaranteed output if you give the same input every time. AI is generally more fuzzy logic.
If it can run on a computer, its an algorithm. Definitionally.
Great, Linux is an algorithm.
It might be accurate, but it's also vague enough that it's a pretty useless definition.
I mean, yes. Linux is an algorithm. The programmes called AI are also still algorithms - they're still deterministic, just too much of a tangled mess, too complex, for a anyone too realistically break it down step by step.
There are some math problems that cannot be described algorithmically, but because of that they're also non computable. Uh, some thermodynamics and quantum stuff from what I've heard.
That’s my point.
I’d say it’s more like a way to describe a certain kind of algorithm. One that adapts in some way to inputs that defy simple classification. Ultimately you’re probably just safe to replace AI in modern news and internet discussion with LLM or CNN.
I agree with that, but others don’t. And that’s the problem. It’s not a fixed definition. It’s marketing.
The utility of the term “AI” depends on what you’re trying to communicate.
AI is any compute model performing complex enough reasoning that the output does not always resemble the input. They are by definition non deterministic and the same ask can provide different outputs without being influenced by other inputs.
So its a lottery
No
I put in a 5 and get a triangle. I put in the same 5 again and get a transvestite. This is intended behavior.
That system isn’t a magic box. It’s a bag of variables linked together by statistics and what’s basically automated guessing.
Everything is guessing, only death is certain. I've worked with AI/ML for over 15 years long before folks got all hot and bothered by it. Your examples you give are great because if you walked up to a person and just said 5 you might get as random of answers and you gave.
Assuming by AI you mean LLMs, because that is what is hot on social media today, they use statistical probability models to be able to rate their input to output consistency. It is measurable but could never be 100%. No compute or person is 100%, but an LLM is orders of magnitude less consistent than traditional compute.
I use AI on a daily basis. I trust it less than people, but I also am able to feed it dumb questions which is nice.
Yea I do that too. It’s dumb but it’s dumb in useful ways. I think about something, get lost and stuck and paint myself into a corner I don’t always recognize.
Consult the AI. It is always wrong but in trying to convince it of its wrongness, I can find the flaws in my own reasoning and find another way out of my problems.
The AI never got better but just bouncing the ideas off things and hearing the dumbest possible echo back reframes the issue in a useful way.
Since that was a lazy question I decided to be lazy and just copy paste it into Gemini. Enjoy! I have no idea what the point of this is!
Artificial Intelligence isn't a single technology; it has been a massive umbrella term since the 1950s. Broadly, it means creating computer systems capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence.
If LLMs are just one tiny branch on the tree, here is what the rest of the tree looks like:
I asked the question to demonstrate something. You didn’t want to participle in the discussion and that’s fine, but that doesn’t mean the question is “lazy”
I didn't provide you with an answer to your question?
This response is irrelevent to my post.