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.
My dude, there’s this feature of language that is escaping you. That feature is: it changes over time.
Technically speaking any kind of hardware assist to human thought is “AI”. The term started getting used 1956 (McCarthy) and was explicitly a term created as, essentially, marketing: a fresh, ambitious label that would attract funding and academic attention.
Over the years the term “AI” has been applied to a bewildering array of technologies that aren’t called AI anymore because, get this, once a given AI technology has found a niche that it works in, they stop calling it AI. It’s just “software” at that point.
So the term “AI” is a moving target that basically slides on the leading edge of a string of kinda/sorta related technologies, while the parts of it that worked over the decades are given names like “handwriting recognition” or “photographic enhancement” or even “chess playing engine”.
Today “AI”, outside of very specific professional circumstances (jargon, in other words) means degenerative AI. You can rail against this if you like, but you’re just in “old man shakes fist at clouds” territory if you do. You’re basically in the same space as those who insist that people shouldn’t split infinitives; you’ve been bypassed by language.
Exactly. Like it or not, “AI” now means generative AI shit, not machine learning. Much of the reason for that is the marketing hype by the broligarchs. So there’s no point trying to teach people a defunct distinction anymore. We’re going to have to have to come up with a good retronym if we want to talk about pre-LLM/genAI machine learning tech.
Mass Effect favors the term “virtual intelligence”.
And this drift is only partially real. Because AI is such a hype, companies slap AI on stuff that is not what you understand under it.
And as this drift is so asymmetrical, we need to make at least clear what there is that is called AI
The drift is 100% real. Take 100 people at random from off the streets and ask them what “AI” means and they’ll refer to some form of degenerative AI. The users define the language, not some list of experts. (No matter how hard France tries to say otherwise.)
So. You say: because average Joe does not know that there is more to AI then LLMs and Image generation they use AI only for what they know exists.
And because of that we better do not educate those people but think about new terms for stuff that literally is AI? What?