Yeah we all hear the main arguments… AI is bad because of slop content, stealing from creators, brain rot & brain damage, privacy concerns and most importantly… how billionaires are just using it for their own selfish reasons
But I’m asking about YOU 🫵 personally. The individual. What do you really think about AI? Do you care or are you indifferent? Has it actually affected your day to day life?
The terminology can definitely be misleading. AI evokes anything ranging from a pathfinding algorithm to sci-fi sapient machine that takes over the world.
I think it can be accurately said that AI as in Artificial Intelligence is the end goal of the machine learning field, but it gets fuzzy fast on definitions whether the field has actually done that in any capacity.
Partly I guess because the concept of intelligence in the first place is largely a way of thinking about humans, not machines. Is a light “intelligent” if a sensor can detect when somebody within range and then the sensor triggers the light to turn off? It’s doing something that is useful, but it doesn’t know what it’s doing as a separate consciousness. I think it can be argued that what gets called generative AI is similar to that, but with a lot more complexity to the inference operations.
I would say the mistake is in thinking that if a tool becomes sufficiently complex, it is necessarily heading toward something distinct like what humans have as consciousness. But this is not taking into account form. Humans have a very specific biological form and if you simulate aspects of that form in a machine, you haven’t now recreated consciousness; you have created an advanced simulation of one or more facets of human-like cognition or processes. This can still have benefits. A blueprint for a building constructed from computed simulation could probably have use to an architect, even though it’s not the real building created yet.
So perhaps something like Simulated Cognition would be more appropriate for most of what gen “AI” is, in practice.
I agree with your points and perspective, but I also fell like “Simulated Cognition” is a bit too generous. I don’t think an LLM/what we currently have as generative “AI” is a simulation of cognition, though I acknowledge/concur that is the intent. Perhaps I’m splitting hairs too finely, but I see it instead as a statistical approximation of language processing.
I mean, I guess one could just say, “yeah, they’re a statistical approximation of language processing with the intent of simulating cognition”, and I’d have to acquiesce. So I guess my hang up hinges on how one interprets the word “simulated,” because I think its connotation tends to be more weighty than its literal definition. For example, if we said “Mock Cognition,” that’s more obviously fake cognition (to me, anyway). Whereas a mathematical simulation of something, for instance the flight trajectory of a satellite or rocket, is not the real thing, but is more or less expected to exactly model the real thing (at least in my selected example). And it makes me uncomfortable to apply that perception to the “Simulated Cognition” of our models that approximate language processing.
That’s fair. I’m definitely not married to either term. Mainly trying to work out something that is more accurate.
I will say, the reason I go for “simulated” is because for me, the connotation I think of is video game style simulation, i.e. something that is understood to be not real. But that may not be the takeaway most would have.
Either way, I get the concern of not overstating what gen AI is doing. Though on the other hand, I think it’s important not to understate it either. Like what models are doing now with complex code, or with reasoning layers, it seems almost trivializing to call it statistics, even if that is a component part of it.
We could also call them Bullshitting Machines, haha. They sure act like that sometimes. But yeah, I’m open to better ideas on better terminology for it. Precise terminology has never been my strongest area. I’m more apt to use language fluidly.
Virtual Cognition? 🤔 No, I don’t think we’re going to come up with anything better than Bullshitting Machines