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.
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?
You missed something.
THEY ALREADY DO THIS!
Literally nobody outside of an AI practitioner calls the autofocus in their camera “AI”. It’s called “autofocus”. Nobody (but a practitioner) refers to facial recognition as AI. They call it face recognition. Nobody calls a chess engine AI. They call it a chess engine. Nobody calls the older algorithms used by Google Translate, Baidu Translate, et al “AI”. They call it translation software. Etc. etc. etc.
“AI” is what you call it when it’s still a bit mysterious, when its use cases haven’t crystallized, and when, perhaps too, it’s not particularly reliable, and of course when you’re doing hucksterism. Once a solid use case has been found, and the techniques made reliable and stable, the current wave of AI will be given another name.
You’re seriously in “old man shakes fist at clouds” territory here, dudebro. I’d recommend perhaps reading the history of “AI” and seeing that pattern I’m citing. It even has a name: Tesler’s Theorem.