Technology

As an Artificial Intelligence proponent, I want to see the field succeed and go on to do great things. That is precisely why the current exaggerated publicity and investment around "AI" concerns me. I use quotation marks there because what is often referred to as AI today is not whatsoever what the term once described. The recent surge of interest in AI owing to Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT has put this vaguely defined term at the forefront of dialogue on technology. But LLMs are not meaningfully intelligent (we will get into that), yet it has become common parlance to refer to these chatbots as AI1 2.

Pretty sure that this has been happening for as long as AI and similar things like machine learning have been a thing. Overstated promises, people consistently presenting research or products or investments using the sexiest terms they can manage. New term comes out (e.g. "Artificial General Intelligence") to differentiate more-sophisticated AI, and they get latched onto and dragged down into the muck too.

I think that the fix is to come up with terms attached to concrete technical capabilities, where there's no fuzziness to exploit by people trying to promote their not-as-sophisticated-as-they'd-like-them-to-appear things.

I liked this article, and I think a lot of the commenters here are missing that the general public is treating LLMs as AGI. I have a whole 5-10 minutes I spend on why this is when I present about LLMs.

"The I in LLM stands for Intelligence" is a joke I read (and include in my presentation to hammer the point home). Laymen have no idea what AI or LLMs are, but they expect it to work similarly to human intelligence, since that's the only model they know, and are surprised to learn it doesn't work that way.

Edit: Forgot what I came to the comments to post, before I read everyone else's complaints about this, lol.

A small correction: the Air Canada example wasn't an LLM, it was just an old "dumb" chatbot that was likely sharing outdated policies.

gasp you mean, industry is lying to investors about a new technology to get more investment and creating a false narrative for the public to undermine criticism? Who could have seen this coming!

I use quotation marks there because what is often referred to as AI today is not whatsoever what the term once described.

The field of AI has been around for decades and covers a wide range of technologies, many of them much "simpler" than the current crop of generative AI. What is often referred to as AI today is absolutely what the term once described, and still does describe.

What people seem to be conflating is the general term "AI" and the more specific "AGI", or Artificial General Intelligence. AGI is the stuff you see on Star Trek. Nobody is claiming that current LLMs are AGI, though they may be a significant step along the way to that.

I may be sounding nitpicky here, but this is the fundamental issue that the article is complaining about. People are not well educated about what AI actually is and what it's good at. It's good at a huge amount of stuff, it's really revolutionary, but it's not good at everything. It's not the fault of AI when people fail to grasp that, no more than it's the fault of the car when someone gets into it and then is annoyed it won't take them to the Moon.

"...AI" concerns me. I use quotation marks there because what is often referred to as AI today is not whatsoever what the term once described.

Lost me right there. Not only was and is this AI, but the term gets narrower over time, not broader. If you want to go by "what the term once described," you have to include computer vision, text to speech, optical character recognition, behavior trees for video game enemies, etc etc etc.

When I see people complain about calling LLMs "AI," I think the only definition that would satisfy them is "things computers can do that we aren't used to yet."

I've seen so many bots on lemmy summarising the contents of websites and blocked all of them, because of this. They are not reliable, and I still caught myself reading those. I don't even want to know how many summaries which are in a post body are just generated by an LLM.

I think it's less of an issue of LLMs being drunk and more that ostensibly sober people put them behind the wheel totally aware of how drunk they are while telling everyone that they're stone cold sober.

This is the reason I balk at personifiing these things with human terms. It sounds cool but it is both inaccurate and misleading especially in the hands of the media and the general public.

I for one think LLMs are more intelligent than an ant. The writer of this piece is using the movie definition of AI instead of the real world definition of AI.