I think AI is neat.

  • ALostInquirer@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    Which is a fair point, because AI has never meant “general AI”, it’s an umbrella term for a wide variety of intelligence like tasks as performed by computers.

    Do you mean in the everyday sense or the academic sense? I think this is why there’s such grumbling around the topic. Academically speaking that may be correct, but I think for the general public, AI has been more muddled and presented in a much more robust, general AI way, especially in fiction. Look at any number of scifi movies featuring forms of AI, whether it’s the movie literally named AI or Terminator or Blade Runner or more recently Ex Machina.

    Each of these technically may be presenting general AI, but for the public, it’s just AI. In a weird way, this discussion is sort of an inversion of what one usually sees between academics and the public. Generally academics are trying to get the public not to use technical terms loosely, yet here some of the public is trying to get some of the tech/academic sphere to not, at least as they think, use technical terms loosely.

    Arguably it’s from a misunderstanding, but if anyone should understand the dynamics of language, you’d hope it would be those trying to calibrate machines to process language.

    • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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      9 months ago

      Well, that’s the issue at the heart of it I think.
      How much should we cater our choice of words to those who know the least?

      I’m not an academic, and I don’t work with AI, but I do work with computers and I know the distinction between AI and general AI.

      I have a little irritation at the theme, given I work in the security industry and it’s now difficult to use the more common abbreviation for cryptography without getting Bitcoin mixed up in everything.

      All that aside, the point is that people talking about how it’s not “real AI” often come across as people who don’t know what they’re talking about, which was the point of the image.