Please stop using this argument. Unless you also brought it up every single time the term was used in videogames etc
It’s a bad argument that relies on pure language semantics that helps no one and undermines any good argument against it because it weakens your stance
I do bring it up every case and even if I didn’t this case it’s an important distinction. Artificial intelligence is a marketing term used to conjure images of Jarvis and what not in people heads.
Video games companies never claimed to have near sentiment AGI baked into their games that would replace all human workers or blow up the world.
The term artificial intelligence is used to anthropomorphize LLMs as weird as that seems.
It is an important distinction. These are large language models, not reasoning models, not AGI, not artificial life not artificial intelligence.
I know that term as been used by the machine learning community in the past to mean things like decision trees and general models, and it didn’t really matter much then but it matters A LOT now.
Words have meanings. This isn’t arguing semantics, it’s using words as they are intended so we can communicate effectively about something in the world. To argue otherwise is naive, dishonest, and quite honestly just annoying.
Hi I’m new to this debate and I agree with you that language matters and all that stuff you said at the end. That being said, I’m firmly in the camp of “LLMs are bad, but a ‘true’ AI would be even worse for us”. I could type up several paragraphs diving into the several reasons why I think that way, but to save time (and to get back to my job) I’m just going to steal this Frank Herbert quote:
Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them
Do I think AI, in a vacuum, is always bad and will be no matter who or what makes it? No, not necessarily. But whatever we build will be inherently, and intrinsically tied to the micro- and macro-systems of our society, which are all DEEPLY fucked. Consequently, any AI we bring in would also, even if not initially, end up as being equally, deeply, fucked and end up being far, FAR more detrimental than positive
Well barring any weird things like a soul, the human brain is a physical object in the world. So any and all of its abilities should be replicatable. Perhaps not with the computer architecture we have but possibly some other way.
So using the brain as inspiration basically. Seeing how it reasons and using what is learned there to build a synthetic system.
we can argue what actual ai would be, as long as we agree that it remains very firmly in the realm of science fucking fiction, just this side of inertial dampener fields and FTL travel.
I do agree that any ai made by this society as it exists would be apocalyptic. all its stories about ‘evil ai’ are just metaphors for itself. we have already given up our thinking to computers (which don’t yet think) and corporations and kings and markets. we fucking love giving up our thinking. it’s like the whole appeal of fascism for most fascists.
no. no because in video games it was understood that the “ai: very hard” was not actually ai, it was computer player. it did actually use some very early research in the field, but it was not ai and even at age ten I knew that. ai would not have so many dumb pathing problems. nobody was trying to tell me the AI from unreal:tournament or starcraft: brood war had feelings or was going to conquer the world, so clarification was not required.
its not ai. its not on the cutting edge of the field of researching ai. its not progress. it does not get us closer. it does not tell us anything about ourselves or information science we didn’t learn from satoshi nakamoto or Adolph Hitler years earlier.
It doesn’t have to be cutting edge or even progress to be AI, how did you get that idea? Obviously Anthropic and OpenAI have cutting edge AI, they are considered the global leaders, even if they go bankrupt in a few months.
I think you are confusing AI with AGI or strong AI.
There is not 1 single way to make an AI, and there are HUGE differences in how good they are, but very very definitely we have had AI since the 80’s. Back then it just wasn’t really usable, that began to a very small degree in the 90’s, with for instance expert systems.
we call it ai when its at the frontier of how close we’re getting to ai. cultural convention.
this shit isn’t and never was.
we also call stuff that is parts of what would be an agi theoretically if we ever build one, kinds of narrow reasoning and the like. this shit isn’t and never will be.
No we don’t, no such definition exist, you clearly don’t know what AI even means. You probably also don’t know what intelligence means. But that’s OK many people don’t.
You clearly didn’t bother educating yourself, either with the link I sent, or looking it up for yourself.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making.
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a hypothetical type of artificial intelligence that matches or surpasses human capabilities
There’s a huge difference between the 2, having some abilities associated with human intelligence, and matching or surpassing are 2 very different things.
Also notice that the Strong AI remains hypothetical, while AI does not because we already have an abundance of that.
There is no historic term that is as you describe, except maybe if you go back to ancient Greek philosophy. But even within philosophy the words are used as I described.
You are making shit up, because you claimed that’s how “we” use it. In current tense.
I hope you learned something, because your claim was way way off any definition.
If we fix the name, it will not change what it does, and it probably won’t fix how people use and feel about it. “Really Good Guessing Machine” is less marketable than “Artificial Intelligence”, and much closer to the truth, but CEOs would be willing to take credit for laying off 20% of their workforce because they have RGGM now.
Maybe “Predictive Token Gamble”, to convey that all it does is predict tokens, and each output, each use case, and the entire industry as a whole is a gamble… “PTG reduced our human capital expenditure by 20%” still goes a long way, though.
I think it would change how people use it. the people ordering it used are mostly very stupid. the current push, insurability of anything that uses it, and flood of endless vc cash, is based on the bullshit fairy tale.
the people ordering it used are mostly very stupid
We met with my mom’s tax preparer a couple of months ago. He wasn’t able to get anybody’s taxes done on time because his super-expensive tax prep software crashed and burned on him. I told him it was possible (if not probable) that the software had become vibe-coded and his problem was AI. He surprised me by going into raptures of joy over how great AI was. He then told me that he had invested tens of thousands of dollars in some dude who was developing a “reactionless space drive”, and that this guy had solved all the problems he was having with it by using ChatGPT. I asked him if the dude had a working prototype and he said no, but it was sure to work now that ChatGPT had fixed it.
I considered explaining to him how LLMs work and what “confidently wrong” meant, but I thought better of it. Now I have to find a new tax preparer for next year.
You misunderstand AI. Limited algorithms are still AI. So yes, video game algorithms are AI, LLMs are not, because they are statistical garbage generators.
quibbling over definitions but sure, it’s kind of technically but the media push over thus shit gas garbled the language so communication between experts casual stuff knowers and gormless fuckwits has three mostly non overlapping sets of meanings for a bunch of words
LLMs are none of that. They have no determinism, no concept of context and their “reaction” are pure statistics.
yes, absolutely. and? Still makes them AI. Just not AGI (what the tech bros think they sell).
Video game NPC “AI” is actual AI, based on deterministic rules, combining contextual(!) inputs to determine reactions.
yes, and? You described an algorithm. If used in the context of game AI, it falls into the category of AI. The same way an LLM falls also the broad definition of AI. It’s just not AGI
This is exactly the stupid sematic discussion I mentioned above. You are fighting the wrong fight. Start focusing on calling their bullshit for not being AGI. That’s something you can actually attack. Calling it not AI is just factually a categorical error. And weakins your argument
Calling it not AI is just factually a categorical error.
I can’t just sit and watch people say this nonsense. It is not Intelligent. It is hardly artificial. It is a marketing concept and should be called out as such.
And frankly I think its worth calling out marketing bullshit because 1. people should be informed what is really going on here, and 2. that companies marketing it this way are trying to convince you that there is some intelligence behind it so you can trust and use it.
Snake oil and wish fullfilment with a heavy dose of personal information data gathering/privacy invasion and addiction. That is whats going on here.
What people are actually using are probability engines. Statisical guessing machines. Nothing more. Every word and every letter is just a prediction based on the probability the next one is going to occur and fit. There is no desireable outcome that it cares about.
There is no understanding or consciousness. No decision making based on anything else, no feeling, no desire, nothing.
The term, in mathmatics and computer science is technically correct, as the field started around the late 1940’s. But this term is taken to mean far more than this and marketed as such. Hence why Trump tried to rebrand yet again with Super Intelligence, just more marketing.
These are money making schemes conflated with desire for power and a gold rush where no company wants to be late to the party. It’s an investment loop; a sleight of hand to move money.
Look at all the bullshit they build into the chatbots alone to try and humanize it: memories of you, telling you that you are very smart, agreeing by design, particularly to the point of making stuff up. The sycophany is used to drive engagement, even when the answer is wrong.
I don’t think one can object to any technology iteself, it is the implementation and details where things get problematic.
So I have objections to both the implementation of LLMs and the marketing spin of making claims that AI (as a lay person thinks about it) exists by calling it such.
I would love to have the star trek computer; impassionate answers to question asked by natural language. That part is kind of great.
But not at the expense of the environment, job insecurity, loss cognitive abilities, electricity consumption, harvesting everyones data for private gain.
We just aren’t ready to handle those challenges yet.
AI (as sold to us) is currently under the assumption that eventually, with enough resources thrown at the problem, become stable and useful. But there is no guarantee that will be true, and they are still missing the models of how reasoning should work.
What is your definition of intelligence?
Just remember, its irrelavant to this discussion, because the point I am making is that what we have today is not about intelligence in the first place, its about marketing, engagement, and making money.
But in terms of what AI we have today? Intelligence has a foundation based on knowledge, where a lot of social cues, second guesses, self regulation, intuition, and other applied behaviours. LLM’s start down a track and continue it to a conclusion. They may review their writing, add more inputs, but they again just go down the same probabalistic course.
Intelligence is knowing your limits, having tacit knowledge (judgement based on experience), generate novel concepts (AI as we have it today is likely to collapse knowledge, not contribute to it), ability to apply rationale from other fields and sources while creating conclusions, and sensory input that is not just wieghted models.
No one talked about AGI, and of course video game NPCs do not have that.
LLMs are - technically speaking - the shittiest subset of the broad field of AI research. However, since they have zero determinism, they are the absolute opposite of “intelligent”. They are artificial morons, if anything. And I object to the overuse of “AI” because words are important, and most humans are incredibly gullible and when everyone and their news station calls something “AI”, they will assume it is intelligent and will rely on its outputs. This will kill people.
Therefore: No, LLMs are not AI. They are statistical garbage generators with a high word prediction accuracy that is enough to fool humans into falsely believing they have understanding of context.
They are statistical garbage generators with a high word prediction accuracy that is enough to fool humans into falsely believing they have understanding of context.
That very precisely describes a lot of people I know.
This is almost exactly the opposite of how LLMs work.
LLMs running under greedy decoding are deterministic finite state machines. A lot of work has gone into making their output nondeterministic because probabilistic next-token generation is more useful.
The more accurate characterization would be that LLMs are context-dependent deterministic state machines with adjustable nondeterministic sampling algorithms bolted onto the decoder.
Also, just as a side note:
They have no determinism, no concept of context and their “reaction” are pure statistics.
This is almost exactly the opposite of how LLMs work.
With the exact state of training data, and the exact prompt history, you’ll get the same output. Problem is that you only get this scenario a single time. And as much as a spelling error, or simply repeating the same prompt twice, will not yield deterministic output.
So no, LLM garbage is not deterministic. Otherwise it would be possible to predict output before the matrix processes the input.
They have no determinism, no concept of context and their “reaction” are pure statistics.
This almost perfectly describes human behavior.
That’s nonsense. Most mammals have a high understanding of context, and humans are very much able to produce deterministic answers to a given problem.
With greedy decoding (temperature set to 0) LLM output is deterministic. The same input will always result in the same output — every time. This is a fact.
Just because something isn’t amenable to calculation does not mean it is nondeterministic, for example the Three Body Problem. This is a fact.
Humans are stupid unpredictable base animals that hold almost no understanding of the world around them or their place within it, while at the same time their heard-level behaviors are almost, if not entirely, predictable. This is a cynical joke.
By any definition of AI, a rock could be intelligent. If you interpret it as doing something that resembles intelligence, that is intelligence as we understand it. It wouldn’t likely be widely accepted, but the going definition of intelligence accepts that broadness.
Please stop using this argument. Unless you also brought it up every single time the term was used in videogames etc
It’s a bad argument that relies on pure language semantics that helps no one and undermines any good argument against it because it weakens your stance
I do bring it up every case and even if I didn’t this case it’s an important distinction. Artificial intelligence is a marketing term used to conjure images of Jarvis and what not in people heads.
Video games companies never claimed to have near sentiment AGI baked into their games that would replace all human workers or blow up the world.
The term artificial intelligence is used to anthropomorphize LLMs as weird as that seems.
It is an important distinction. These are large language models, not reasoning models, not AGI, not artificial life not artificial intelligence.
I know that term as been used by the machine learning community in the past to mean things like decision trees and general models, and it didn’t really matter much then but it matters A LOT now.
Words have meanings. This isn’t arguing semantics, it’s using words as they are intended so we can communicate effectively about something in the world. To argue otherwise is naive, dishonest, and quite honestly just annoying.
Hi I’m new to this debate and I agree with you that language matters and all that stuff you said at the end. That being said, I’m firmly in the camp of “LLMs are bad, but a ‘true’ AI would be even worse for us”. I could type up several paragraphs diving into the several reasons why I think that way, but to save time (and to get back to my job) I’m just going to steal this Frank Herbert quote:
Do I think AI, in a vacuum, is always bad and will be no matter who or what makes it? No, not necessarily. But whatever we build will be inherently, and intrinsically tied to the micro- and macro-systems of our society, which are all DEEPLY fucked. Consequently, any AI we bring in would also, even if not initially, end up as being equally, deeply, fucked and end up being far, FAR more detrimental than positive
Yeah true AI would be quite insane. Especially if it was behind human capabilities.
There’s just no way to ensure it’s aligned towards good. We can’t even define that ourselves. Who knows the suffering we could unleash on ourselves.
What does true AI even mean? What do any of the things you guys say even mean? What?
Not a LLM. LLMs aren’t intelligent they are pretty much just pattern matching. No world model or real reasoning capabilities
You want to build a machine with real reasoning capabilities? What does that even mean? How is that supposed to work?
Well barring any weird things like a soul, the human brain is a physical object in the world. So any and all of its abilities should be replicatable. Perhaps not with the computer architecture we have but possibly some other way.
So using the brain as inspiration basically. Seeing how it reasons and using what is learned there to build a synthetic system.
we can argue what actual ai would be, as long as we agree that it remains very firmly in the realm of science fucking fiction, just this side of inertial dampener fields and FTL travel.
I do agree that any ai made by this society as it exists would be apocalyptic. all its stories about ‘evil ai’ are just metaphors for itself. we have already given up our thinking to computers (which don’t yet think) and corporations and kings and markets. we fucking love giving up our thinking. it’s like the whole appeal of fascism for most fascists.
no. no because in video games it was understood that the “ai: very hard” was not actually ai, it was computer player. it did actually use some very early research in the field, but it was not ai and even at age ten I knew that. ai would not have so many dumb pathing problems. nobody was trying to tell me the AI from unreal:tournament or starcraft: brood war had feelings or was going to conquer the world, so clarification was not required.
It’s as much AI as when they made the chess computer that beat Kasparov, it’s just not a very sophisticated AI.
its not ai. its not on the cutting edge of the field of researching ai. its not progress. it does not get us closer. it does not tell us anything about ourselves or information science we didn’t learn from satoshi nakamoto or Adolph Hitler years earlier.
It doesn’t have to be cutting edge or even progress to be AI, how did you get that idea? Obviously Anthropic and OpenAI have cutting edge AI, they are considered the global leaders, even if they go bankrupt in a few months.
I think you are confusing AI with AGI or strong AI.
There is not 1 single way to make an AI, and there are HUGE differences in how good they are, but very very definitely we have had AI since the 80’s. Back then it just wasn’t really usable, that began to a very small degree in the 90’s, with for instance expert systems.
Maybe read this to become better informed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intelligence
we call it ai when its at the frontier of how close we’re getting to ai. cultural convention.
this shit isn’t and never was.
we also call stuff that is parts of what would be an agi theoretically if we ever build one, kinds of narrow reasoning and the like. this shit isn’t and never will be.
No we don’t, no such definition exist, you clearly don’t know what AI even means. You probably also don’t know what intelligence means. But that’s OK many people don’t.
You clearly didn’t bother educating yourself, either with the link I sent, or looking it up for yourself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence
But you probably don’t understand it, and conflate it with strong AI:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence
There’s a huge difference between the 2, having some abilities associated with human intelligence, and matching or surpassing are 2 very different things.
Also notice that the Strong AI remains hypothetical, while AI does not because we already have an abundance of that.
I’m talking about how the term has historically been used, not dictionaries. I’m not going to argue about what’s in the dictionary.
There is no historic term that is as you describe, except maybe if you go back to ancient Greek philosophy. But even within philosophy the words are used as I described.
You are making shit up, because you claimed that’s how “we” use it. In current tense.
I hope you learned something, because your claim was way way off any definition.
If we fix the name, it will not change what it does, and it probably won’t fix how people use and feel about it. “Really Good Guessing Machine” is less marketable than “Artificial Intelligence”, and much closer to the truth, but CEOs would be willing to take credit for laying off 20% of their workforce because they have RGGM now.
Maybe “Predictive Token Gamble”, to convey that all it does is predict tokens, and each output, each use case, and the entire industry as a whole is a gamble… “PTG reduced our human capital expenditure by 20%” still goes a long way, though.
I think it would change how people use it. the people ordering it used are mostly very stupid. the current push, insurability of anything that uses it, and flood of endless vc cash, is based on the bullshit fairy tale.
We met with my mom’s tax preparer a couple of months ago. He wasn’t able to get anybody’s taxes done on time because his super-expensive tax prep software crashed and burned on him. I told him it was possible (if not probable) that the software had become vibe-coded and his problem was AI. He surprised me by going into raptures of joy over how great AI was. He then told me that he had invested tens of thousands of dollars in some dude who was developing a “reactionless space drive”, and that this guy had solved all the problems he was having with it by using ChatGPT. I asked him if the dude had a working prototype and he said no, but it was sure to work now that ChatGPT had fixed it.
I considered explaining to him how LLMs work and what “confidently wrong” meant, but I thought better of it. Now I have to find a new tax preparer for next year.
lol somebody down voted that. this fucking cult is out of hand.
How is what people do any better or different than the Really Good Guessing Machine?
What is AI to you then? Is the only thing that’s AI a fully working consciousness but running on silicon instead of synapses?
already replied to another that covers this
You misunderstand AI. Limited algorithms are still AI. So yes, video game algorithms are AI, LLMs are not, because they are statistical garbage generators.
quibbling over definitions but sure, it’s kind of technically but the media push over thus shit gas garbled the language so communication between experts casual stuff knowers and gormless fuckwits has three mostly non overlapping sets of meanings for a bunch of words
You are spot on, and the ones downvoting you are simply wrong.
it’s funny because they are literally proving my point. But oh well
It’s sad how many stupid people are here. 🙁
Too much reddit contrarianism leaking. All too keen to say the same 4 taglines to a topic without any understanding if it even makes sense
I don’t know what it is, but sometimes it feels like debating a stupid 12 year old.
You missed the point. Video game NPC “AI” is actual AI, based on deterministic rules, combining contextual(!) inputs to determine reactions.
LLMs are none of that. They have no determinism, no concept of context and their “reaction” are pure statistics.
yes, absolutely. and? Still makes them AI. Just not AGI (what the tech bros think they sell).
yes, and? You described an algorithm. If used in the context of game AI, it falls into the category of AI. The same way an LLM falls also the broad definition of AI. It’s just not AGI
This is exactly the stupid sematic discussion I mentioned above. You are fighting the wrong fight. Start focusing on calling their bullshit for not being AGI. That’s something you can actually attack. Calling it not AI is just factually a categorical error. And weakins your argument
I can’t just sit and watch people say this nonsense. It is not Intelligent. It is hardly artificial. It is a marketing concept and should be called out as such.
And frankly I think its worth calling out marketing bullshit because 1. people should be informed what is really going on here, and 2. that companies marketing it this way are trying to convince you that there is some intelligence behind it so you can trust and use it.
Could you inform me of what is really going on here?
Snake oil and wish fullfilment with a heavy dose of personal information data gathering/privacy invasion and addiction. That is whats going on here.
What people are actually using are probability engines. Statisical guessing machines. Nothing more. Every word and every letter is just a prediction based on the probability the next one is going to occur and fit. There is no desireable outcome that it cares about.
There is no understanding or consciousness. No decision making based on anything else, no feeling, no desire, nothing.
The term, in mathmatics and computer science is technically correct, as the field started around the late 1940’s. But this term is taken to mean far more than this and marketed as such. Hence why Trump tried to rebrand yet again with Super Intelligence, just more marketing.
These are money making schemes conflated with desire for power and a gold rush where no company wants to be late to the party. It’s an investment loop; a sleight of hand to move money.
Look at all the bullshit they build into the chatbots alone to try and humanize it: memories of you, telling you that you are very smart, agreeing by design, particularly to the point of making stuff up. The sycophany is used to drive engagement, even when the answer is wrong.
You seem reasonable and even-tempered, so I’d like to give you a considered response so I can hear your thoughts. But first I wanna ask:
Do you object to the technology as a whole, or only to the use of the moniker AI to described LLMs?
What is your definition of intelligence?
I don’t think one can object to any technology iteself, it is the implementation and details where things get problematic.
So I have objections to both the implementation of LLMs and the marketing spin of making claims that AI (as a lay person thinks about it) exists by calling it such.
I would love to have the star trek computer; impassionate answers to question asked by natural language. That part is kind of great.
But not at the expense of the environment, job insecurity, loss cognitive abilities, electricity consumption, harvesting everyones data for private gain.
We just aren’t ready to handle those challenges yet.
AI (as sold to us) is currently under the assumption that eventually, with enough resources thrown at the problem, become stable and useful. But there is no guarantee that will be true, and they are still missing the models of how reasoning should work.
Just remember, its irrelavant to this discussion, because the point I am making is that what we have today is not about intelligence in the first place, its about marketing, engagement, and making money.
But in terms of what AI we have today? Intelligence has a foundation based on knowledge, where a lot of social cues, second guesses, self regulation, intuition, and other applied behaviours. LLM’s start down a track and continue it to a conclusion. They may review their writing, add more inputs, but they again just go down the same probabalistic course.
Intelligence is knowing your limits, having tacit knowledge (judgement based on experience), generate novel concepts (AI as we have it today is likely to collapse knowledge, not contribute to it), ability to apply rationale from other fields and sources while creating conclusions, and sensory input that is not just wieghted models.
What is your definition?
Therefore: No, LLMs are not AI. They are statistical garbage generators with a high word prediction accuracy that is enough to fool humans into falsely believing they have understanding of context.
correction: this will kill more people. it’s been doing that for a while
That very precisely describes a lot of people I know.
This is almost exactly the opposite of how LLMs work.
LLMs running under greedy decoding are deterministic finite state machines. A lot of work has gone into making their output nondeterministic because probabilistic next-token generation is more useful.
The more accurate characterization would be that LLMs are context-dependent deterministic state machines with adjustable nondeterministic sampling algorithms bolted onto the decoder.
Also, just as a side note:
This almost perfectly describes human behavior.
With the exact state of training data, and the exact prompt history, you’ll get the same output. Problem is that you only get this scenario a single time. And as much as a spelling error, or simply repeating the same prompt twice, will not yield deterministic output.
So no, LLM garbage is not deterministic. Otherwise it would be possible to predict output before the matrix processes the input.
That’s nonsense. Most mammals have a high understanding of context, and humans are very much able to produce deterministic answers to a given problem.
don’t argue with it like its a person. even if IRS made of meat, it is engaging in bad faith.
By any definition of AI, a rock could be intelligent. If you interpret it as doing something that resembles intelligence, that is intelligence as we understand it. It wouldn’t likely be widely accepted, but the going definition of intelligence accepts that broadness.
they literally are. AI is a very broad term. They are just not AGI.
People need to learn that categories exist and have grouping hirarchies. You’re proving my point wonderfully
Exactly. My farts are AI. I agree!