Am I the only one getting agitated by the word AI (Artificial Intelligence)?

Real AI does not exist yet,
atm we only have LLMs (Large Language Models),
which do not think on their own,
but pass turing tests
(fool humans into thinking that they can think).

Imo AI is just a marketing buzzword,
created by rich capitalistic a-holes,
who already invested in LLM stocks,
and now are looking for a profit.

  • Daxtron2@startrek.website
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    5 months ago

    I’m more infuriated by people like you who seem to think that the term AI means a conscious/sentient device. Artificial intelligence is a field of computer science dating back to the very beginnings of the discipline. LLMs are AI, Chess engines are AI, video game enemies are AI. What you’re describing is AGI or artificial general intelligence. A program that can exceed its training and improve itself without oversight. That doesn’t exist yet. AI definitely does.

    • MeepsTheBard@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      5 months ago

      I’m even more infuriated that AI as a term is being thrown into every single product or service released in the past few months as a marketing buzzword. It’s so overused that formerly fun conversations about chess engines and video game enemy behavior have been put on the same pedestal as CyberDook™, the toilet that “uses AI” (just send pics of your ass to an insecure server in Indiana).

      • Daxtron2@startrek.website
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        5 months ago

        I totally agree with that, it has recently become a marketing buzzword. It really does drag down the more interesting recent discoveries in the field.

    • KingRandomGuy@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Right, as someone in the field I do try to remind people of this. AI isn’t defined as this sentient general intelligence (frankly its definition is super vague), even if that’s what people colloquially think of when they hear the term. The popular definition of AI is much closer to AGI, as you mentioned.

  • PonyOfWar@pawb.social
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    5 months ago

    The word “AI” has been used for way longer than the current LLM trend, even for fairly trivial things like enemy AI in video games. How would you even define a computer “thinking on its own”?

      • Lath@kbin.social
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        5 months ago

        But will they be depressed or will they just simulate it because they’re too lazy to work?

        • the post of tom joad@sh.itjust.works
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          5 months ago

          simulate [depression] because they’re too lazy

          Ahh man are you my dad? I took damage from that one. has any fiction writer done a story about depressed ai where they talk about how depression can’t be real because it’s all 1s and 0s? Cuz i would read the shit out of that.

        • JackFrostNCola@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          If they are too lazy to work that would imply they have motivation and choice beyond “doing what my programming tells me to do ie. input, process, output”. And if they have the choice not to do work because they dont ‘feel’ like doing it (and not a programmed/coded option given to them to use) then would they not be thinking for themselves?

      • PonyOfWar@pawb.social
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        5 months ago

        Not sure about that. A LLM could show symptoms of depression by mimicking depressed texts it was fed. A computer with a true consciousness might never get depression, because it has none of the hormones influencing our brain.

        • Deceptichum@kbin.social
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          5 months ago

          Me: Pretend you have depression

          LLM: I’m here to help with any questions or support you might need. If you’re feeling down or facing challenges, feel free to share what’s on your mind. Remember, I’m here to provide information and assistance. If you’re dealing with depression, it’s important to seek support from qualified professionals like therapists or counselors. They can offer personalized guidance and support tailored to your needs.

          • PonyOfWar@pawb.social
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            5 months ago

            Give it the right dataset and you could easily create a depressed sounding LLM to rival Marvin the paranoid android.

          • Markimus@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            Sorry, to be clear I meant it can mimic the conversational symptoms of depression as if it actually had depression; there’s no understanding there though.

            You can’t use that as a metric because you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between real depression and trained depression.

    • Ratulf@feddit.de
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      5 months ago

      The best thing is enemy “AI” only needs to be made worse right away after creating it. First they’ll headshot everything across the map in milliseconds. The art is to make it dumber.

    • dutchkimble@lemy.lol
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      5 months ago

      It doesn’t rhyme, And the content is not really interesting, Maybe it’s just a rant, But with a weird writing format.

    • UnityDevice@startrek.website
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      5 months ago

      They didn’t just start calling it AI recently. It’s literally the academic term that has been used for almost 70 years.

      The term “AI” could be attributed to John McCarthy of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), which Marvin Minsky (Carnegie-Mellon University) defines as "the construction of computer programs that engage in tasks that are currently more satisfactorily performed by human beings because they require high-level mental processes such as: perceptual learning, memory organization and critical reasoning. The summer 1956 conference at Dartmouth College (funded by the Rockefeller Institute) is considered the founder of the discipline.

      • 9bananas@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        perceptual learning, memory organization and critical reasoning

        i mean…by that definition nothing currently in existence deserves to be called “AI”.

        none of the current systems do anything remotely approaching “perceptual learning, memory organization, and critical reasoning”.

        they all require pre-processed inputs and/or external inputs for training/learning (so the opposite of perceptual), none of them really do memory organization, and none are capable of critical reasoning.

        so OPs original question remains:

        why is it called “AI”, when it plainly is not?

        (my bet is on the faceless suits deciding it makes them money to call everything “AI”, even though it’s a straight up lie)

        • UnityDevice@startrek.website
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          5 months ago

          so OPs original question remains: why is it called “AI”, when it plainly is not?

          Because a bunch of professors defined it like that 70 years ago, before the AI winter set in. Why is that so hard to grasp? Not everything is a conspiracy.

          I had a class at uni called AI, and no one thought we were gonna be learning how to make thinking machines. In fact, compared to most of the stuff we did learn to make then, modern AI looks godlike.

          Honestly you all sound like the people that snidely complain how it’s called “global warming” when it’s freezing outside.

          • 9bananas@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            just because the marketing idiots keep calling it AI, doesn’t mean it IS AI.

            words have meaning; i hope we agree on that.

            what’s around nowadays cannot be called AI, because it’s not intelligence by any definition.

            imagine if you were looking to buy a wheel, and the salesperson sold you a square piece of wood and said:

            “this is an artificial wheel! it works exactly like a real wheel! this is the future of wheels! if you spin it in the air it can go much faster!”

            would you go:

            “oh, wow, i guess i need to reconsider what a wheel is, because that’s what the salesperson said is the future!”

            or would you go:

            “that’s idiotic. this obviously isn’t a wheel and this guy’s a scammer.”

            if you need to redefine what intelligence is in order to sell a fancy statistical model, then you haven’t invented intelligence, you’re just lying to people. that’s all it is.

            the current mess of calling every fancy spreadsheet an “AI” is purely idiots in fancy suits buying shit they don’t understand from other fancy suits exploiting that ignorance.

            there is no conspiracy here, because it doesn’t require a conspiracy; only idiocy.

            p.s.: you’re not the only one here with university credentials…i don’t really want to bring those up, because it feels like devolving into a dick measuring contest. let’s just say I’ve done programming on industrial ML systems during my bachelor’s, and leave it at that.

            • UnityDevice@startrek.website
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              5 months ago

              These arguments are so overly tired and so cyclic that AI researchers coined a name for them decades ago - the AI effect. Or succinctly just: “AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet.”

              • 9bananas@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                i looked it over and … holy mother of strawman.

                that’s so NOT related to what I’ve been saying at all.

                i never said anything about the advances in AI, or how it’s not really AI because it’s just a computer program, or anything of the sort.

                my entire argument is that the definition you are using for intelligence, artificial or otherwise, is wrong.

                my argument isn’t even related to algorithms, programs, or machines.

                what these tools do is not intelligence: it’s mimicry.

                that’s the correct word for what these systems are capable of. mimicry.

                intelligence has properties that are simply not exhibited by these systems, THAT’S why it’s not AI.

                call it what it is, not what it could become, might become, will become. because that’s what the wiki article you linked bases its arguments on: future development, instead of current achievement, which is an incredibly shitty argument.

                the wiki talks about people using shifting goal posts in order to “dismiss the advances in AI development”, but that’s not what this is. i haven’t changed what intelligence means; you did! you moved the goal posts!

                I’m not denying progress, I’m denying the claim that the goal has been reached!

                that’s an entirely different argument!

                all of the current systems, ML, LLM, DNN, etc., exhibit a massive advancement in computational statistics, and possibly, eventually, in AI.

                calling what we have currently AI is wrong, by definition; it’s like saying a single neuron is a brain, or that a drop of water is an ocean!

                just because two things share some characteristics, some traits, or because one is a subset of the other, doesn’t mean that they are the exact same thing! that’s ridiculous!

                the definition of AI hasn’t changed, people like you have simply dismissed it because its meaning has been eroded by people trying to sell you their products. that’s not ME moving goal posts, it’s you.

                you said a definition of 70 years ago is “old” and therefore irrelevant, but that’s a laughably weak argument for anything, but even weaker in a scientific context.

                is the Pythagorean Theorem suddenly wrong because it’s ~2500 years old?

                ridiculous.

    • Meowoem@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months ago

      It’s a computer science term that’s been used for this field of study for decades, it’s like saying calling a tomato a fruit is a marketing decision.

      Yes it’s somewhat common outside computer science to expect an artificial intelligence to be sentient because that’s how movies use it. John McCarthy’s which coined the term in 1956 is available online if you want to read it

  • Gabu@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    I’ll be direct, your texts reads like you only just discovered AI. We have much more than “only LLMs”, regardless of whether or not these other models pass turing tests. If you feel disgruntled, then imagine what people who’ve been researching AI since the 70s feel like…

  • MeetInPotatoes@lemmy.ml
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    5 months ago

    Maybe just accept it as shorthand for what it really means.

    Some examples:

    We say Kleenex instead of facial tissue, Band-Aid instead of bandage, I say that Siri butchered my “ducking” text again when I know autocorrect is technically separate.

    We also say, “hang up on someone” when there is no such thing anymore

    Hell, we say “cloud” when we really mean “someone’s server farm”

    Don’t get me started on “software as a service” too …a bullshit fancy name for a subscription website that actually has some utility.

  • geekworking@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    I started reading it as “Al” as in the nickname for Allen.

    Makes the constant stream of headlines a bit more entertaining, imagining all of the stuff that this guy Al is up to.

  • Dabundis@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    People: build an algorithm to generate text that sounds like a person wrote it by finding patterns in text written by people

    Algorithm: outputs text that sounds like a person wrote it

    Holyfuck its self aware guys

    • thedeadwalking4242@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Patterns in text are ideas, that’s what text is made to contain, Ideas. They’ve made a algorithm that “generates text that sounds human” but it didn’t understand context, themes, or other more abstract concepts. There is a highly sophisticated amount of emergent behavior from LLMs

  • ikidd@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    As a farmer, my kneejerk interpretation is “artificial insemination” and I get confused for a second every time.

  • ZzyzxRoad@sh.itjust.works
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    5 months ago

    Yes, but I’m more annoyed with posts and conversations about it that are like this one. People on Lemmy swear they hate how uninformed and stupid the average person is when it comes to AI, they hate the click bait articles etc etc. Aaand then there’s at least 5 different posts about it on the front page every. single. day., with all the comments saying exactly the same thing they said the day before, which is:

    “Users are idiots for trusting a tech company, it’s not Google’s responsibility to keep your private data safe.” “No one understands what ‘AI’ actually means except me.” “Every middle-America dad, grandma and 10 year old should have their very own self hosted xyz whatever LLM, and they’re morons if they don’t and they deserve to have their data leaked.” And can’t forget the ubiquitous arguments about what “copyright infringement” means when all the comments are actually in agreement, but they still just keep repeating themselves over and over.

  • Despair@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    A lot of the comments I’ve seen promoting AI sound very similar to ones made around the time GME was relevant or cryptocurrency. Often, the conversations sounded very artificial and the person just ends up repeating buzzwords/echo chamber instead of actually demonstrating that they have an understanding of what the technology is or its limitations.

  • flop_leash_973@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    The term is so over used at this point I could probably start referring to any script I write that has condition statements in it and convince my boss I have created our own “AI”.

    • TeckFire@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      For real. Like some enemies in Killzone 2 “act” pretty clever, but aren’t using anything close to LLM, let alone “AI,” but I bet you if you implemented their identical behavior into a modern 2024 game and marketed it as the enemies having “AI” everyone would believe you in a heartbeat.

      It’s just too overencompasing. Saying “large language model technology” may not be as eye catching, but it means I know if you at least used the technology. Anyone can market as “AI” and it could be an excel formula for all I know.

      • Gabu@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        The enemies in killzone do use AI… the Goombas in the first Super Mario bros. used AI. This term has been used to refer to npc behavior since the dawn of videogames.

        • TeckFire@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          I know. That’s not my point. I know that technically, “AI” could mean anything that gives the illusion of intelligence artificially. My use of the term was more of the OP, that of a machine achieving sapience, not just the illusion of one. It’s just down to definitions. I just prefer to use the term in a different way, and wish it was, but I accept that the world does not

  • EnderMB@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    I work in AI, and the fatigue is real.

    What I’ve found most painful is how people with no fucking clue about AI or ML chime in with their expert advice, when in reality they’re as much an expert on AI as a calculator salesman is an expert in linear algebra. Having worked closely with scientists that hold PhD’s, publish papers regularly, and who work on experiments for years, it makes me hate the hustle culture that’s built up around AI. It’s mostly crypto cunts looking for their next scheme, or businesses looking to abuse buzzwords to make themselves sound smart.

    Purely my two-cents, but while LLM’s have surprised a lot of people with their high quality output. With that being said, they are known to heavily hallucinate, cost fuckloads, and there is a growing group of people that wonder whether the great advances we’ve seen are either due to a lot of hand-holding, or the use of a LOT of PII or stolen data. I don’t think we’ll see an improvement from what we’ve already seen, just many other companies having their own similar AI tools that help a little with very well-defined menial tasks.

    I think the hype will die out eventually, and companies that decided to bin actual workers in favour of AI will likely not be around 12-24 months later. Hopefully most people and businesses will see through the bullshit, and see that the CEO of a small ad agency that has positioned himself as an AI expert is actually a lying simpleton.

    As for it being “real AI” or “real ML”, who gives a fuck. If researchers are happy with the definition, who are we to be pedantic? Besides, there are a lot of systems behind the scenes running compositional models, handing entity resolution, or building metrics for success/failure criteria to feed back into improving models.

    • fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months ago

      Get Rick quick mentality needs to GTFO of tech already. I’m also tired of promising tech getting over hyped then all good will and enthusiasm burned at the alter of scams. Stuff takes time and hard work, and that costs money to hire experts to do and capital to do it. There are no silver bullets. Adoption takes effort and time, so not every solution is worth adopting. Not every industry has the same problems. Reinventing the wheel in productive way is a high risk activity.

      Not telling you, just yelling at the void because you made me think of it.

    • AeonFelis@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      they are known to heavily hallucinate, cost fuckloads, and there is a growing group of people that wonder whether the great advances we’ve seen are either due to a lot of hand-holding,

      Same can be said for certain humans.

  • angstylittlecatboy@reddthat.com
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    5 months ago

    I’m agitated that people got the impression “AI” referred specifically to human-level intelligence.

    Like, before the LLM boom it was uncontroversial to refer to the bots in video games as “AI.” Now it gets comments like this.

    • Loki@feddit.de
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      5 months ago

      I wholeheartedly agree, people use the term “AI” nowadays to refer to a very specific subcategory of DNNs (LLMs), but yeah, it used to refer to any more or less “”“smart”“” algorithm performing… Something on a set of input parameters. SVMs are AI, decision forests are AI, freaking kNN is AI, “artificial intelligence” is a loosely defined concept, any algorithm that aims to mimic human behaviour can be called AI and I’m getting a bit tired of hearing people say “AI” when they mean gpt-4 or stable diffusion.

      • Kedly@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        I’ve had freaking GAMERS tell me that “It isnt real AI” at this point… No shit, the Elites in Halo aren’t Real AI either

        Edit: Keep the downvotes coming anti LLMers, your tears are delicious