As an Artificial Intelligence proponent, I want to see the field succeed and go on to do great things. That is precisely why the current exaggerated publicity and investment around “AI” concerns me. I use quotation marks there because what is often referred to as AI today is not whatsoever what the term once described. The recent surge of interest in AI owing to Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT has put this vaguely defined term at the forefront of dialogue on technology. But LLMs are not meaningfully intelligent (we will get into that), yet it has become common parlance to refer to these chatbots as AI1 2.

Pretty sure that this has been happening for as long as AI and similar things like machine learning have been a thing. Overstated promises, people consistently presenting research or products or investments using the sexiest terms they can manage. New term comes out (e.g. “Artificial General Intelligence”) to differentiate more-sophisticated AI, and they get latched onto and dragged down into the muck too.

I think that the fix is to come up with terms attached to concrete technical capabilities, where there’s no fuzziness to exploit by people trying to promote their not-as-sophisticated-as-they’d-like-them-to-appear things.

“…AI” concerns me. I use quotation marks there because what is often referred to as AI today is not whatsoever what the term once described.

Lost me right there. Not only was and is this AI, but the term gets narrower over time, not broader. If you want to go by “what the term once described,” you have to include computer vision, text to speech, optical character recognition, behavior trees for video game enemies, etc etc etc.

When I see people complain about calling LLMs “AI,” I think the only definition that would satisfy them is “things computers can do that we aren’t used to yet.”