I’m grumpy today about the things that are called Artificial Intelligence. Not everything a computer does is AI. Most of it isn’t.
We slap the label AI on things because it allows us to sell things that otherwise wouldn’t be marketable as having significance. We do the same with American flags.
I just read an article that referred to vocie-to-text as AI. Please. That is table stakes for any operating system now. It isn’t intelligent, it is doing the menial task we set for it as a machine.
I’m a child of science fiction. I grew up immersed in reading that genre. My weird mix of permissive social views and small-L libertarianism is a direct outgrowth of consuming way too many American SF authors when I was way too young.
I also have a pretty strict view of what constitutes Artificial Intelligence. What we have today is not intelligent. Scary good predictive text is just a probability engine spitting out the next most likely word based on the average of a corpus of information. Efficient machine-written computer code is another tool. These things are not intelligence.
Apple got it closer to correct when they called their technology “machine learning.” Even “Apple Intelligence” annoys me as inaccurate.
But what if generative whatever-you-call-it is intelligence? Can you prove you are thinking? Can you prove that you, as a human, are not just saying and doing your daily tasks without thought? Is the dirty secret here that machines doing predictive tasks revealed the lie that humans themselves are intelligent?
Maybe it’s the heat.
Also you can have my em-dash when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.