alt Hacker NewsI’m a bit frustrated. AI can do a looot of things; but I think as we continue to muddy the waters between LLMs and more traditional machine learning like Monte Carlo, Genetic Algoriths, Expert Systems and other Statistics magic tricks, we’re too aggressively conflating established and morally neutral activities in ML with the concerns that people have about LLMs and Stable Diffusion.
Though I also imagine that that is the point.
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I wish I could wave a magic wand and just make the word "AI" go away. It has no actual meaning. It could mean anything from your opponent in Mario Kart to Stable Diffusion.
"AI" is a term cursed by cool sci-fi implications. It makes it a kick ass marketing term because most people are going to have some familiarity with sci-fi AI and "X media predicted Y technology" is a pretty widespread belief for a lot of values of X (star trek, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Arthur C. Clarke) and Y (internet, cell phones, VR). If you want to tell someone we're making big strides in something, linking it into some popsci understanding of sci-fi being the great predictor of human achievement is low effort and high impact for quite a few people.
People aren't trying to communicate accurately if their first priority is getting you excited about the thing!
I have been practicing saying ML for traditional machine learning and LLMs for LLMs for just this reason. Trying not to say AI anymore. Too ambiguous. Sometimes I'm talking about game AI even, I'll try to use shorthand for whatever algorithm I think the AI is using (often I'll talk about its flowchart, though not always sure it's literally using that under the hood).
Just as more successful machine learning fields distanced themselves from the term during the AI winter, I suppose we will (and perhaps are?) be seeing them adopt it again, now that we are in an "AI summer".
Reinforcement learning can solve a Rubik’s Cube. A LLM that hasn’t been trained to solve a Rubik’s Cube can not.
Recently I heard some people conflate procedural generation and generative AI and I had to explain why there isn't some legal or ethical issue with what breaks down to essentially scattering some points.
It's really getting annoying having to have these conversations.
> AI can do a looot of things
AI is not a real thing or a natural kind but a perspective. Whether something qualifies as "AI" or not cannot be decided by the objective features of the thing. Ergo, it can be defined at the author's pleasure.
> conflating established and morally neutral activities in ML
LLMs are no more or less morally neutral than other ML techniques.
It is a problem because people will talk about what AI can do implying that an LLM can do that thing, making it seem like a pure LLM can do almost anything. On the other hand people will say AI will never be able to do X because an LLM can’t do that thing well natively. AI has become too vague of a term to be useful.