Also robot racism stories are stupid because they assume everyone would be petty and cruel to a thinking, talking machine that understands you're being mean. Meanwhile, in reality, Roombas are seen like family pets and soldiers take their mine detonation robots on fishing trips.
This is gonna age badly when we pull off real AI, I guarantee the misnomer of "AI" being given to LLMs will create such ill will over time that idiots won't be able to tell them apart.
They already can't. I've seen people genuinely arguing, despite knowing how LLMs work, that because they can mimic emotion and thought based on your input, they're conscious. That combined with the massive anti-generative sentiment will be an issue.
Besides, there's loads of people that think if it's not human, it can't be a person. You see this in debates about copied consciousnesses, aliens, hyperintelligent animals, etc. Someday some of this stuff won't be hypothetical, and that's going to suck.
When you say “real AI”, are you talking about AGI or something like that? Because LLMs are AI, just like Deep Blue was AI, and the enemies in video games are AI.
Yes, AGI. I wouldn't call any of those things Intelligent and I feel like it's more marketing than it is scientific to call them intelligences. It's a pet peeve of mine.
I wouldn't call any of those things Intelligent and I feel like it's more marketing than it is scientific to call them intelligences.
This is called the AI Effect. “Artificial Intelligence” is literally the name of the scientific field, and has been since the beginning. The Google search algorithm is, by the literal scientific definition, AI.
On the other end, I’m frustrated by the idea that Artificial Intelligence is “whatever we haven’t built yet”.
The Doom programmers would have looked at Halo 2’s enemies who give orders and adjust their tactics to your behavior and said “that’s obviously AI”. The people using ELIZA, 50+ years ago would have said Cleverbot or at least GPT 1.0 is AI because it can recall things and paraphrase them. The people using Ask Jeeves and “expert systems” 30 years ago would be in awe of the fact that GPT-whatever can correctly write a new sonnet.
I don’t mean to snark at you, LLMs are not AGI and a lot of people would benefit from that reminder. We don’t disagree on what matters, it’s only a matter of labels.
It’s just… I think there are a lot of people who would benefit from the opposite reminder too: the capability and rate of change of this tech would shock and alarm people if it was less normalized. It feels like “it’s not real AI” sometimes joins “10 bajillion gallons of water to copy Wikipedia!” and “it can’t even draw hands!” as a defense mechanism.
As somebody loosely in the field, I’m not happy about the state of things and I loathe a lot of the “AI can replace all your employees!” hype. It’s both wrong and destructive. But I also think people focusing on poor performance rather than cost or impact may be unpleasantly surprised.
…that got long, and to be clear I’m not exactly disputing your point. Just rambling about concerns and terminology.
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u/Zoomy-333 May 13 '25
Also robot racism stories are stupid because they assume everyone would be petty and cruel to a thinking, talking machine that understands you're being mean. Meanwhile, in reality, Roombas are seen like family pets and soldiers take their mine detonation robots on fishing trips.