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It's more like showing someone from 1980 a modern smart phone you call a Portable Mind Reader and them saying, "yeah, but it can't read my mind."


Are people really this hung up on the term “AI”? Who cares? The fact that this is a shockingly useful piece of technology has nothing to do with what it’s called.


Because the AI term makes people anthropomorphize those tools.

They "hallucinate", they "know", they "think".

They're just the result of matrix calculus on which your own pattern recognition capacities fool you into thinking there is intelligence there. There isn't. They don't hallucinate, their output is wrong.

The worst example I've seen of anthropomorphism was the blog from a searcher working on adverse prompting. The tool spewing "help me" words made them think they were hurting a living organism https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnYnCFgT3hF6LJPwn/why-white-...

Speaking with AI proponents feels like speaking with cryptocurrencies proponents: the more you learn about how things work, the more you understand they don't and just live in lalaland.


Because marketing keeps deeply overpromising things.

Maybe hype is overly beneficial to them but if you promise me 1500 and I get 1100 then I will underwhelmed.

And especially around LLM marketing hype is fairly extreme.


If you lived before the invention of cars, and if when they were invented, marketers all said "these will be able to fly soon" (which of course, we know now wouldn't have been true), you would be underwhelmed? You wouldn't think it was extremely transformative technology?


From where does the premise that "artificial intelligence" is supposed to be infallible and super human come from? I think 20th century science fiction did a good job of establishing the premise that artificial intelligence will be sometimes useful but will often fail in bizarre ways that seem interesting to humans. Misunderstandings orders, applying orders literally in a way humans never would, or just flat out going haywire. Asimov's stories, HAL9000, countless others. These were the popular media tropes about artificial intelligence and the "real deal" seems to line up with them remarkably well!

When businessmen sell me "artificial intelligence", I come prepared for lots of fuckery.




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