In the last weeks, I have seen some posts against kinds of AI, we are using as a society since decades (yes, decades) just because the Term AI is used.

When we are talking about society and planet destroying AI, we are talking generative AI. That is that shit we know als Claude and ChatGPT.

But media (and we) are starting to mix this up with “classical Machine Learning”

Some stuff that is AI, and I am pretty sure we are not fighting against:

  • hand written numbers recognition (developed around 30 years ago)
  • lane hold assist systems
  • voice recognition
  • image classification (computer aided diagnostics in radiology is around since 2010).

Those tasks do not need GPUs, huge amount of RAM or electricity.

We should differentiate between Generative AI (LLM, Video and image Generation) and those old school, valid and useful “AI” systems.

Not seeing a difference between those things is a AI Bro behavior, and should be beneath us.

Just being against everything because somebody wrote “AI” besides it only offers AI Bros an attack surface on every other argument we bring forward.

Everything that makes GenAI bad (hallucinations, AI psychosis, energy consumption, RAM usage,…) is a result of the generative part.

An AI model that recognizes YOUR (yes, your!) handwriting on a envelope and routes your letter correctly, and does that since decades, is also AI. I hope nobody here expects us to go back to sorting boxes and hand sorting of letters and packages.

EDIT: for more detail on AGI vs. GenAI look at this great comment.

  • x1gma@lemmy.world
    0·
    22 hours ago

    To expand on your post:

    AI is an umbrella term for three different levels of intelligence:

    Weak AI or ANI (Artificial Narrow Intelligence): This is where we currently are, and where we actually already have been for decades. It’s a system that has specialized knowledge in some narrow domain. That chess program you played against 20 years ago, your cars built in driving security systems, your assistant on your phone (even the old ones pre Gen-AI), and that school project you’ve coded that consists of 87 hand-rolled if-conditions (which you now know is called a rule engine), and every LLM or LLM-based product is an ANI. An ANI could compete with a human in its specialized domain, but it’s not able to transfer knowledge from one domain to another.

    Strong AI or AGI (Artificial General Intelligence): An AGI does now have specialized knowledge in a single domain, but all human knowledge in all domains, and could perform comparably to a qualified human in anything you task it to do. This is science fiction, no matter how hard OpenAI wants to push its IPO. There isn’t even a definitive confirmation that we will ever achieve AGI, it’s “only” likely to happen at some point. This point in time would be the so-called singularity.

    *ASI (Artificial super intelligence): Basically the same as an AGI, just that it’s better in everything. Even more science fiction, even less to say about it. Another purely theoretical construct, unlikely to be ever achieved.

    What’s important to mention: Any LLM is by definition only an ANI, and it can never be an AGI. LLMs have a single domain: stochastic text proposals. They have no intelligence, emotion, knowledge or transfer capabilities. An LLM cannot be an AGI - ever. Whether it enables us to create it at some point - maybe. It seems intelligent and knowledgeable, because modern hardware, clouds and some algorithmic advances enabled a system which is (very simplified) based on the same algorithms like T9-typing on your old nokia, but has an absolutely unimaginable amount of data fed in. It seems emotional, because it’s based on data produced by humans, and we all are emotional beings, and also because it’s a system designed to be manipulative. You will only continue your LLM subscription when your “LLM-Buddy” is helpful, not only in providing good answers, but also packaging them in text which creates an emotional response in you when you read it.