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Machine learning is easily the most amazing technology I've witnessed in 50 years. AI is advancing so fast, and I'm not 100% sure where the public pulse is on this one. Has it swung fully into raw hatred? There's good reason for that. But it's also here, and getting astonishingly good.

"GenAI" is a marketing concept that pickbacks on the great advances of so many years of ML, despite being functionally the opposite (using patterns to generate content rather than deriving patterns from data) to sell a fantasy of the machine "thinking".

They're technical rooted in some of the same fundamentals, but those who profit from selling "AI" have purposely conflated them to justify products that are still probability algorithms pretending to do thoughtful or creative work.

I worry that LLMs/image GAN have set back the actual AI field (mostly ML) as the image of ML is likely now tainted by the false promises of some sentient super-being computer that has never and will never exist - a myth propped up to sell GPUs.

One direction takes data and finds statistical models from it. The other uses statistical models to generate junk that is the average of everything fed in the other side. One of those two directions is something a non-thinking machine is good for.

Both systems learn and apply statistical patterns. The distinction is artificial - the real conversation is about impact, not technical semantics.

Impact is inherent to usage of a tool. Conflating the use of ML and GenAI is an intentional marketing move by those selling GenAI. One can be used for somewhat reliable image recognition. The other puts together mediocre sentences of averaged words that is sold as "revolutionary technology".