AI is all the rage right now. It's everywhere, you can't avoid it.
But what is AI?
I'm not going to try and answer that here. What I will do, though, is state the question somewhat differently:
What is meant by "AI" in a given context?
And this matters, because the words we use are important.
The reality is that when you see AI mentioned it really could be almost anything. Some things AI might mean are:
- Copilot
- ChatGPT
- Gemini
- Some other specific off the shelf public LLM
- Anything involving any off the shelf LLM
- A custom domain-specific LLM
- Machine learning
- Pattern matching
- Image recognition
- Any old computer program
- One of the AI companies
And there's always the possibility that someone has simply slapped AI on a product as a marketing term with no AI involved.
This persistent abuse of terminology is really unhelpful. Yesterday I went to a very interesting event for conversations about Hopes and Fears around AI.
Am I hopeful or fearful about AI? It depends which of the above definitions you mean.
There are certain uses of what might now be lumped in with AI that have proven to be very successful, but in many cases they're really machine learning, and have actually been around for a long time. I'm very positive about those (for example, helping in medical diagnoses).
On the other hand, if the AI is a stochastic parrot trained via large scale abuse of copyright while wreaking massive environmental damage, then I'm very negative about that.
So I think it's important to get away from sticking the AI label onto everything that might have some remote association with a computer program, and be far more careful in our terminology.
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