this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2024
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“AI” is the new “Space-Age”.
It's like how they slapped 'Smart' on every tech product in the past decade. Even devices that are dumb as fuck are called 'Smart' devices. Words entirely lost their meaning because of advertisers abusing trendy words.
Even 'AI' is being abused. I always thought of AI as artificial consciousness, an unnatural and created-by-humans self-aware and self-thinking being. Most of the AI products now are just search engines, image generators and apps being programmed to do something. In fact stuff like ChatGPT would've made more sense to actually be called 'Smart' search engines instea of 'AI'. They might be technological achievements, but they're not AI.
When I was a teen, it was "e"-everything. E-mail, e-pets, e-bologna, e-games, e-surance, whatever. eBay is a relic of this era.
I’m not a big fan of “Smart” as a marketing term, either, but “Automatable” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, and “Connected” doesn’t really have the same appeal. That said, “smart” was used pretty consistently to refer to devices that could be controlled as part of a “smart home.” It wasn’t supposed to refer to a device that itself was intelligent, though.
Sounds like you’re thinking of AGI (artificial general intelligence) or that your understanding is based off sci fi as opposed to the academic discipline/field of research, which has been around since the 1950s.
And yes, marketing is often inaccurate… but almost every instance I’ve seen where they say they’re using AI, they were.
IMO “Smart” would be more misleading than “AI,” even if “Smart” didn’t have an existing, unrelated meaning. I do think we could use better words - AI is such a broad category that it doesn’t say much to call a product “AI-powered.” Stable Diffusion and Llama use completely different types of AI, for example. But people broadly recognize the term (even if they don’t understand it properly) and the same can’t be said for terms like “LLM.”
You’re illustrating the AI effect - “discounting of the behavior of an artificial-intelligence program as not "real" intelligence.” AI is used in a ton of different ways that you likely don’t ever think about or even notice.
I recommend reading over at least the introduction to the Artificial Intelligence article on Wikipedia before proclaiming that something that fits cleanly into the definition of AI isn’t AI.
If you ask me, we're still in the space age. Can't wait for New Glenn's maiden launch, hopefully this year