Which is a fair point, because AI has never meant "general AI", it's an umbrella term for a wide variety of intelligence like tasks as performed by computers.
Autocorrect on your phone is a type of AI, because it compares what words you type against a database of known words, compares what you typed to those words via a "typo distance", and adds new words to it's database when you overrule it so it doesn't make the same mistake.

It's like saying a motorcycle isn't a real vehicle because a real vehicle has two wings, a roof, and flies through the air filled with hundreds of people.

[–] ParsnipWitch@feddit.de 7 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I've often seen people on Lemmy confidently state that current "AI" thinks and learns exactly like humans and that LLMs work exactly like human brains, etc.

[–] LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 7 months ago

Are you sure this wasn't just people stating that when it comes to training on art there is no functional difference in the sense that both humans and AI need to see art to make it?

[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Weird, I don't think I've ever seen that even remotely claimed.

Closest I think I've come is the argument that legally, AI learning systems are similar to how humans learn, namely storing information about information.

[–] ParsnipWitch@feddit.de 0 points 7 months ago

It's usually some rant about "brains are just probability machines as well" or "every artists learns from thousands of pictures of other artists, just as image generator xy does".

[–] ALostInquirer@lemm.ee 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Which is a fair point, because AI has never meant “general AI”, it’s an umbrella term for a wide variety of intelligence like tasks as performed by computers.

Do you mean in the everyday sense or the academic sense? I think this is why there's such grumbling around the topic. Academically speaking that may be correct, but I think for the general public, AI has been more muddled and presented in a much more robust, general AI way, especially in fiction. Look at any number of scifi movies featuring forms of AI, whether it's the movie literally named AI or Terminator or Blade Runner or more recently Ex Machina.

Each of these technically may be presenting general AI, but for the public, it's just AI. In a weird way, this discussion is sort of an inversion of what one usually sees between academics and the public. Generally academics are trying to get the public not to use technical terms loosely, yet here some of the public is trying to get some of the tech/academic sphere to not, at least as they think, use technical terms loosely.

Arguably it's from a misunderstanding, but if anyone should understand the dynamics of language, you'd hope it would be those trying to calibrate machines to process language.

[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 1 points 7 months ago

Well, that's the issue at the heart of it I think.
How much should we cater our choice of words to those who know the least?

I'm not an academic, and I don't work with AI, but I do work with computers and I know the distinction between AI and general AI.

I have a little irritation at the theme, given I work in the security industry and it's now difficult to use the more common abbreviation for cryptography without getting Bitcoin mixed up in everything.

All that aside, the point is that people talking about how it's not "real AI" often come across as people who don't know what they're talking about, which was the point of the image.