The current AI situation is like if the people who were pushing NFTs had successfully gotten everyone to start referring to any and all digital transactions as an NFT, thus allowing them to pretend that things like online shopping, downloadable video games, bank transfers, etc were closely related to convincing middle-aged would-be techies to invest serious money in ugly digital paintings, and hold the former examples up in defense of the latter any time someone pointed out that the whole NFT thing was a racket. What do you mean NFTs are bad, don’t you want disabled people to be able to use their phones to have medication delivered to their doorstep? Wow. Horrible of you, really.
Thissssssss. I was in a Metafilter conversation about it the other day where people were self importantly explaining to me that the term artificial intelligence is very old and has been seriously invested in off and on since the 1950s. Which is true… and has included at least two periods of decades long investment that ended in conclusions from first the US government and later private investors that the entire idea was either a scam or a waste of time (in the 1970s and the 1990s).
Machine learning and these bullshit LLMs are not the same thing, goddammit, and we shouldn’t pretend that they are. Either the umbrella term covers all modern computing and is essentially meaningless, or we are talking about a new technology and have to discuss how incredibly unreliable the damn things are. Pick one, dammit.