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Yup. "AI" should be understood primarily as a marketing term designed to impress people who have no understanding of (nor any real interest in understanding) the underlying tools and processes.

Courtney Milan@courtneymilan.com

It does suck that "AI" now means both generative AI (boo hiss) and a whole basket of incredibly useful machine learning techniques.

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When "machine learning" was the trendy term, the tech companies kept promising the world and delivered...well, not much. So when generative AI took off, a lot of them simply rebranded ML as AI and are making the same undeliverable promises with more-or-less the same tech.

I still read AL for Ai, and I think there should be periods after each letter. A.I. ... PET PEEVE. I freely acknowledge AL is easier to type. I mean AI. Frankly, it deserves NO important capitalization a'tall.

The idea of AI from scifi and this thing we have now that uses sparkling linear algebra to guess the next word or pixel it should produce is so sad. My dog is an idiot and is smarter than this garbage.

AI to me has a requirement to create novel ideas. ML is it's own thing but important. LLMs are just glorified auto complete and are problematic when people think it is anything else but that.

One of my favourite facts about AI, learned from Yarden Katz’s excellent book, Artificial Whiteness, was that the term was coined in the 1950s essentially because researchers thought it would be the one most likely to get money out of the Pentagon.

LLM. The things being passed off as AI are really large language model scripts. Think of the whole thousand monkeys with typewriters, only substitute parrots. Real AI is supposed to be an independently thinking machine, not a parrot regurgitating your uncle’s racist and sexist thoughts.

How can AI that aggregates ideas from scanning fiction works be truly 'creative'? It can imitate a writer's style but where does the originality spring from? I'm sure Amazon is being flooding with AI-generated 'fan fiction.'

AI seems to be wrong a lot. I'm pretty much ignoring any news that doesn't talk about that.. If it's wrong because it frequently hallucinates, I'm not sure it's a really good business tool. Certainly not good for running a government.

So...so tired of "AI" talk. Closest I've ever seen to "machine learning" (a misnomer for clever algorithms written by wildly intelligent people) in practice is Abnormal Security. Such a neat solution that works very well.