[HN Gopher] If a PR Says "Artificial Intelligence," There's a Go...
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If a PR Says "Artificial Intelligence," There's a Good Chance It's
Meaningless
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 70 points
Date : 2023-05-06 18:36 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (slate.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (slate.com)
| qwery wrote:
| "A.I.-PR industrial complex" is a bizarre term, presumably coined
| by the author. I'm not sure what they mean by it, but seeing as
| "crypto" was one of its predecessors (as in the crypto-industrial
| complex?? The crypto press release industrial complex??), I'm
| guessing: not much.
|
| > There's just too much attention that comes with saying the term
| "A.I." for anyone to stop now. ChatGPT isn't the only part of the
| A.I. boom that sometimes just makes stuff up.
|
| This is absolutely the case.
|
| P.S. what is a "threadbois"?
| Tao3300 wrote:
| A heady red wine made of grapes from the Threadbois region.
| mattdeboard wrote:
| [dead]
| spacetime_cmplx wrote:
| It's far easier to do productive, useful things with AI if you
| just treat it as a tool, like a chainsaw or a pulley.
|
| Everyone agrees there's a lot of hype right now but no one thinks
| _they're_ a part of it. You know why? It's because we're told
| we're on an exponential growth (we are), so everyone is trying to
| force it. So each time there's a breakthrough, we're desperate
| for it to be rocketship that takes us there.
|
| It's time to step back and let the exponential thing happen on
| its own. We didn't get here because people in the 20th century
| sat down and plotted a way to achieve exponential growth; it just
| sorta happened.
| bombcar wrote:
| If it's a PR, there's a good chance it's meaningless.
| allears wrote:
| There is no artificial intelligence. There are only systems that
| are very good at generating text or images when given a text
| prompt. That's not intelligence, and it's misleading if not
| dangerous to call it that.
| brookst wrote:
| It's just semantics. Some people use intelligence to mean
| sentience, others use it to mean directed problem solving /
| solution-finding.
| eynsham wrote:
| Could you give an example of people who explicitly claim that
| sentience is equivalent to intelligence? I'd agree that some
| arguments trade on an equivocation between the two, but I
| don't think their adherents intentionally do so.
| brookst wrote:
| The post I replied to seemed to make the conflation.
| Because "just guessing the next word" seems like a
| reasonable refutation to sentience, but not to
| intelligence.
|
| I agree that it's not usually an intentional mixup. From
| what I've seen it's mostly a lack of rigor in defining
| terms.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| It writes better texts than many adult humans, and outside of a
| persons area of expertise it probably performs better than an
| adult human as long as the problem can be described in text.
|
| It is overly optimistic, and does make mistakes, but it
| certainly shows intelligent behaviour.
| hilbertseries wrote:
| It's interesting that we view the fact that it makes mistakes
| as evidence it's not intelligent. By this metric then, humans
| are also not intelligent.
| elbigbad wrote:
| Words change over time. Plenty of words have changed meaning in
| my lifetime to become less formal than they once were. And I
| guarantee I used to be this pedantic about some of them,
| particularly around the usage of grammar and punctuation, and
| in some cases am still very stubbornly pedantic even though
| it's clear the world has moved on and I'm the only one left on
| the hill.
|
| The phrase "artificial intelligence" is the same here. You may
| still die on this hill, but the world has moved on. AI has
| become overloaded to mean a wide variety of things and not just
| the "dangerous" generalized terminator robot you're
| envisioning.
|
| One strategy to cope is to come up with a new word and define
| it as you'd like, being careful to not overload it.
| eynsham wrote:
| There are arguments for this position that are philosophically
| and scientifically respectable and to which I am inclined. But
| merely repeating this nostrum isn't very constructive. Of
| course, I'm also repeating nostrums here, but I am not making
| any definitive claim here.
|
| 1. Intelligence is surely best characterised not bivalently;
| if, then, it's a matter of degree, it is at least somewhat non-
| trivial to show that LLMs make no progress whatsoever on
| previous AI (soi-disantes).
|
| 2. It's also unclear that intelligence is best characterised by
| a single factor. Perhaps that's uncontroversial in the
| psychometric literature (I wouldn't know), but even then, why
| would g be the right way of characterising intelligence in
| beings with quite different strengths and weaknesses? And, if
| 'intelligence' admits multiple precisifications, the claims
| that (a) some particular system displays intelligence
| simpliciter (perhaps a pragmatic notion) on one such
| precisification and (b) that some particular system displays
| some higher level of intelligence than before in that respect
| are yet weaker and more difficult to rebut.
|
| 3. It's unclear whether 'are' is to be construed literally
| (i.e., indicatively) or as a much stronger claim, e.g., in the
| Fodorian or Lucasian vein, that some wide class of would-be AI
| simply can't achieve intelligence due to some systematic
| limitation.
| SanderNL wrote:
| I had a feeling you had something interesting to say, but I
| couldn't make heads or tails of it.
|
| I am being serious. I just applied GPT4 to ELI5 your comment
| to me. I feel like I have crossed some threshold and I'm not
| sure if I am proud of it, but there it is.
|
| I am still not entirely sure what your main point is, but I
| learned about the Fodorian and Lucasian arguments which I
| don't find particularly impressive, but then again, I need a
| language model to explain things to me. Interesting
| nonetheless.
|
| I did not know about "g" either. How _did_ I survive for so
| long you may ask and it is indeed a miracle. Anyway, a
| nuanced understanding of intelligence seems reasonable and
| useful.
|
| The concept "nostrum" was also new to me as was the word
| "simpliciter". In fact I asked GPT4 for a table of uncommon
| words and concepts in your post and it was quite substantial.
|
| All in all I rarely come across a post that makes me feel
| like an ape and sets me on a path of creativity and
| knowledge. Thank you for that.
|
| Edit: obligatory response in the proper style:
|
| "The manner in which this prose is articulated can be
| characterized as both prolix and imbued with a certain
| aesthetic appeal. One is left to ponder the origins of the
| author's stylistic inclinations. As for my own stance
| concerning the matter of artificial intelligence, it may be
| succinctly encapsulated as follows: "AI demonstrates utility,
| and as such, it possesses merit." This, regrettably,
| constitutes the extent of my intellectual engagement with the
| subject."
| biorach wrote:
| you could have said all of that in a much clearer way with no
| loss of content
| elbigbad wrote:
| Ironically ChatGPT would have made whatever point the
| author was trying to make (I'm not really sure what the
| point was to be honest...) much more succinctly and
| clearly. Maybe one use of ChatGPT as an anti-bloviating
| converter.
| stemlord wrote:
| To me it's a tech colloquialism for a thing that uses a neural
| net in some capacity. I think its misleading to use it to
| describe other types of ML (i.e., SLAM robotics)
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Classical SLAM by optimizing constraint graphs has little to
| do with ML. The optimization function is explicit, and
| there's no training.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > There are only systems that are very good at generating text
| or images when given a text prompt.
|
| How is that not intelligence?
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Two generations ago we were calling chess programs AI. Last
| generation it was face detection in images. Each generation
| makes a new clever thing, calls it AI for a while, puts it to
| good use and forgets about it for the next shiny thing called
| AI for real this time.
|
| Don't get me wrong: the new large models are amazing, and will
| be useful. Not dissing them. Just observing the history of the
| term 'AI' in popular usage.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| This is a irony I've noticed too. Some engineers tell me
| their managers are in a state of panic about how to "best
| make use of AI" (translated: how to ride the current hype
| wave to get nice PR points). The correct answer of course is
| "we already use AI and have been doing so since the 80s".
|
| Considering it is ridiculously impractical to use ChatGPT in
| many areas where 1980s AI techniques are in use (think
| metaheuristics, chess, etc.), I suspect this is rather
| common.
| Closi wrote:
| > There is no artificial intelligence. There are only systems
| that are very good at generating text or images when given a
| text prompt. That's not intelligence, and it's misleading if
| not dangerous to call it that.
|
| Disagree - GPT4 definitely has a level of reasoning, can
| abstract problems, can apply knowledge in new and different
| ways, so it definitely meets some definitions of intelligence.
|
| What's your definition of intelligence that GPT4 wouldn't
| fulfill at some level? (Personally I believe it's possible to
| have intelligence without sentience/self-awareness)
| Diggsey wrote:
| It's missing generality. It can't do basic maths, or even
| follow instructions. It can't make valid moves in a game. It
| can only do what it was trained to do: make a good guess at
| what word should come next.
|
| I don't mean to down-play how impressive models like GPT-4
| are - they are very impressive and have great utility.
|
| The problem is we are talking about PR, and when you throw
| around words like "artificial intelligence" it misleads
| everyone who is not intimately familiar with the limitations
| of such models.
|
| > Personally I believe it's possible to have intelligence
| without sentience/self-awareness
|
| The general public doesn't make that distinction when you
| throw around terms like artificial intelligence. They hear
| artificial intelligence and imagine "thinking machines".
|
| No doubt people will say this is just moving the goalposts -
| that whatever these models achieve it will never be "AI", but
| that's demonstrably false. The concept of AI has existed in
| film and other media in the same form since forever, and it's
| pretty clear if you put those representations side by side
| with what we actually have today, that we are not even close
| yet.
|
| For some reason "advances in machine learning" just isn't hip
| enough to get funding, so "AI" gets thrown around instead.
| Closi wrote:
| > It can only do what it was trained to do: make a good
| guess at what word should come next.
|
| Disagree - GPT's mechanics are that it guesses what
| word/token should come next, however it is now displaying
| emergent capabilities which _do_ show an agent which can
| generalize. Maybe not to 'AGI' levels, but it is starting
| to show little signs of it.
|
| > It can't do basic maths, or even follow instructions. It
| can't make valid moves in a game.
|
| It can do basic maths - better than most humans (but it
| cannot do maths better than a calculator). If I ask GPT4 to
| calculate 51 times 102 it will get the answer, despite most
| humans struggling with this task. It does this just via
| internal representation without any specific 'calculator'
| API call or functionality.
|
| It can follow instructions - if I tell it to take the
| sentence "abcd" and then tell it to follow the following
| steps: "1) swap b and c around, 2) reverse the string, 3)
| ignore step 1", it will output "dcba" and describe how it
| reached that output
|
| It can make valid game moves - Without being formally
| taught chess it will make valid chess moves most of the
| time (see:
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xyjhFCSSXZsW6HDBb/a-chess-
| ga...). It made 29 valid moves before making invalid moves.
| Again, GPT4 has not been specifically trained to play
| chess, it just has picked up some chess rules and games
| while reading the internet and this has somehow formed some
| sort of internal representations for chess within it's
| model. I can also describe a new/novel game or puzzle to
| GPT4 and it can have a go at playing and solving it.
|
| What it can't do is learn at the moment, although learning
| isn't part of a lot of definitions of intelligence, which
| is why we have to define intelligence before you can say if
| it is/isn't intelligent.
| Davidzheng wrote:
| Yeah the previous comment is almost completely wrong. But
| on last point, it didn't get here by hard-coding and the
| reinforcement learning part at the end i think shows it
| definitely can "learn". I guess one thing I would still
| point to is it has a weakened sense of "self" still I
| think, which goes inline with it distinguishing things
| learned in training vs in deployment (though maybe this
| is just intentional idk)
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| > Disagree - GPT4 definitely has a level of reasoning, can
| abstract problems, can apply knowledge in new and different
| ways, so it definitely meets some definitions of
| intelligence.
|
| That's from the humans who generated the original text that
| GPT4 is essentially mining.
|
| Furthermore, until you have a concrete definition of exactly
| what intelligence is, then the question (and answer) don't
| mean much.
| vidoc wrote:
| What we call 'journalists' are people with an iphone and a
| laptop, in an openspace from 9 to 5 and on twitter all day long.
| ShadowBanThis01 wrote:
| No; that's what media outlets now call "journalists."
| Discerning citizens (especially those of us with legitimate
| journalism degrees and experience) don't.
| rogers12 wrote:
| Real Journalism Has Never Been Tried
| squarefoot wrote:
| Well, someone tried, but they sometimes die prematurely.
| shahidkarimi wrote:
| [flagged]
| tchock23 wrote:
| I was on a webinar this week where the speaker suggested that
| 'even if you're selling t-shirts, call yourself a generative AI
| company.' I immediately left the webinar.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Peak is when Kodak shares rocket because of something something
| AI
| ulizzle wrote:
| So far, Chat GPT has failed the Turing Test worse than the Ouija
| board, which, in my experience, didn't fail at all.
|
| This plus the Fermi paradox gives me the creeps.
|
| It raises the uncomfortable question of "free will".
| voz_ wrote:
| I thought the title was about Pull Requests. Ah words.
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