It’s OK to call it Artificial Intelligence: I wrote about how people really love objecting to the term "AI" to describe LLMs and suchlike because those things aren't actually "intelligent" - but the term AI has been used to describe exactly this kind of research since 1955, and arguing otherwise at this point isn't a helpful contribution to the discussion.
simonwillison.net/2024/Jan/7/c…
It’s OK to call it Artificial Intelligence
We need to be having high quality conversations about AI: what it can and can’t do, its many risks and pitfalls and how to integrate it into society in the …simonwillison.net
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Royce Williams
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Simon Willison
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Elio Campitelli
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Mia (web luddite)
in reply to Simon Willison • • •mike bayer
in reply to Simon Willison • • •the term "AI" deeply misleads laypeople into thinking sentient minds are at play, leading to all kinds of misuse/harm. I dont have to list links to all the damage "AI" has done so far due to people putting it in charge of things since "it's intelligent".
going to keep using technical terms like "machine learning" so that all the non-tech people I talk to understand a tech person like me does not consider this stuff to be "intelligent" in any way we usually define that term for humans
mike bayer
in reply to mike bayer • • •Simon Willison
in reply to mike bayer • • •Simon Willison
in reply to Simon Willison • • •It’s OK to call it Artificial Intelligence
simonwillison.netmillennial falcon
in reply to Simon Willison • • •mike bayer
in reply to Simon Willison • • •mike bayer
in reply to mike bayer • • •just as the center of my assertion "I hope you misunderstand what I do", I would use the "AI Safety" letter as the prime example, of billionaires and billionaire-adjacent types declaring that this "AI" is so, so close to total sentience that governments *must* stop everyone (except us! who should be gatekeepers) from developing this *so very dangerous and powerful!* technology any further
lots of non-tech ppl signed onto that thing and it was quite alarming
Simon Willison
in reply to mike bayer • • •Tom Cook
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Simon Willison
in reply to Simon Willison • • •It’s OK to call it Artificial Intelligence
simonwillison.netTristan Harward
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Chris Brennan
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Calling LLMs “AI” is a bald faced lie.
The promoters try to excuse it by saying they’re using a different definition of intelligence now. But they know nobody else is using this novel definition.
They are getting away with it because we live in the Era of Shamelessness.
Ganonmaster
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Ganonmaster
in reply to Ganonmaster • • •Simon Willison
in reply to Ganonmaster • • •Simon Willison
in reply to Simon Willison • • •And another section trying to offer a useful way forward: Let’s tell people it’s “not AGI” instead
simonwillison.net/2024/Jan/7/c…
It’s OK to call it Artificial Intelligence
simonwillison.netSimon Willison
in reply to Simon Willison • • •It’s OK to call it Artificial Intelligence
simonwillison.netBen Evans
in reply to Simon Willison • • •@glyph This is an interesting piece, Simon - thank you for writing it.
I wonder if you're not somewhat undermining your own argument somewhat.
There is no reason at all why the interface to an LLM needs to be a chat interface "like you're talking to a human". That is a specific choice - and we have known for decades that humans will attach undue significance to something that "talks like a person" - all the way back to Eliza. 1/
Simon Willison
in reply to Ben Evans • • •@kittylyst @glyph I'm more than happy to undermine my own argument on this one, I don't particularly strong opinion here other than "I don't think it's particularly useful to be pedantic about the I in AI".
100% agree that the chat interface is a big part of it, and also something which isn't necessarily the best UI for working with these tools, see also: simonwillison.net/2023/Oct/17/…
Open questions for AI engineering
simonwillison.netBen Evans
in reply to Ben Evans • • •Simon Willison
in reply to Ben Evans • • •@kittylyst @glyph The thing I've found particularly upsetting here is the way ChatGPT etc talk in the first person - they even offer their own opinions on things some of the time! It's incredibly misleading.
Likewise the thing where people ask them questions about their own capabilities, which they then convincingly answer despite not having accurate information about "themselves" simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/22/…
Don’t trust AI to talk accurately about itself: Bard wasn’t trained on Gmail
simonwillison.netBen Evans
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Simon Willison
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Added this just now, a thing I learned from social.juanlu.space/@astrojuan… which gave me an excuse to link to 99percentinvisible.org/episode… (I'll never skip an excuse to link to that)
Project Cybersyn - 99% Invisible
99% InvisibleJuan Luis
2024-01-07 09:42:32
Simon Willison
in reply to Simon Willison • • •James Conroy-Finn
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Michael Gemar
in reply to Simon Willison • • •happyborg
in reply to Simon Willison • • •we began debating this on the Safe Network forum and it quickly became obvious that it is incredibly hard to define. There are so many ways to look at phenomena that could be called intelligence, so many timescales and scopes.
Really the first step is to clearly specify your terms. Anything ambiguous is pretty useless.
sayrer
in reply to Simon Willison • • •this is well covered in the older Norvig books (I just looked because I am sitting next to them). PAIP has a very humorous chapter on “GPS" the general problem solver, and AI: A Modern Approach covers the history very well in Section 1.3 (~page 17), and mentions escape from cybernetics, but not the personal stuff.
(I have a bunch of these books, as I would buy anything I could find that would tell me “what computers can do”, and the Internet really wasn't any good yet)
Kofi Loves Efia
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Simon Willison
in reply to Kofi Loves Efia • • •@Seruko I 100% agree that autocomplete at scale isn't intelligent, but I still think "Artificial Intelligence" is an OK term for this field of research, especially since we've been using it to describe non-intelligent artificial systems since the 1950s
I like "AGI" as the term to use for what autocomplete-at-scale definitely isn't
Evan Hensleigh
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Simon Willison
in reply to Evan Hensleigh • • •@futuraprime maybe!
My hunch is that it's easier to teach people that new term than convive them to reject a term that everyone else in society is already using
Evan Hensleigh
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Yeah, that’s fair. Certainly everyone equates LLMs with AI.
The other part of my reluctance is that lots of people are trying to broaden the term to capitalise on it—I’ve seen “AI” applied to all sorts of unsupervised learning tasks to make them sound fancier. The gulf between someone’s random forest classifier and GPT4 is so huge it makes me want to be more specific.
Simon Willison
in reply to Evan Hensleigh • • •Captain Observant
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Richard Terry
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Simon Willison
in reply to Richard Terry • • •Richard Terry
in reply to Simon Willison • • •True, it's not like we can change the narrative now anyway - it's intentional, it's billionaire marketing. Trying to rebrand as "not AGI" is not going to work, the public have never heard of AGI and won't be interested in the difference.
It's trolling vs abuse, or hacker vs cracker again - if I say in the real world "I enjoy trolling" I lose friends, or "I'm a hacker" they imagine me skating around train stations looking for landlines. Difference is, misnomers like that don't risk harm.
𝓼𝓮𝓻𝓪𝓹𝓪𝓽𝓱【ツ】☮(📍🇬🇧)
in reply to Simon Willison • • •maybe, but because some science people working on it called it that doesnt mean we have to accept the word.
the more general term hides the more specific and nuanced and more informative details, also once introduced into the mainstream vocabulary it might clash with other mainstream meaning and it is easier for a small group to change their wording than for a large group.
i generally think scientists should strive to simplify their language, but some actually hide behind it.
Simon Willison
in reply to 𝓼𝓮𝓻𝓪𝓹𝓪𝓽𝓱【ツ】☮(📍🇬🇧) • • •@serapath I think refusing to accept the word at this point actively hurts our ability to have important conversations about it
Is there an argument that refusing to use the word Artificial Intelligence can have a positive overall impact on conversations and understanding? I'm open to hearing one!
𝓼𝓮𝓻𝓪𝓹𝓪𝓽𝓱【ツ】☮(📍🇬🇧)
in reply to Simon Willison • • •i do think AI gives way to much credibility to it. People saw and read scifi movies/books and believe chat gpt & co. despite all the confident bullshit it shares.
also, image recognition is different from a language learning model, so what are we even talking about when talking about AI?
it is way to broad to make useful statements, other than what we all saw in scifi movies at some point imho
Simon Willison
in reply to 𝓼𝓮𝓻𝓪𝓹𝓪𝓽𝓱【ツ】☮(📍🇬🇧) • • •@serapath@gamedev.place That's the exact position I'm arguing against
Yes, it's not "intelligent" like in science fiction - but we need to educate people that science fiction isn't real, not throw away a whole academic discipline and pick a different word!
Image recognition is part of AI too
𝓼𝓮𝓻𝓪𝓹𝓪𝓽𝓱【ツ】☮(📍🇬🇧)
in reply to Simon Willison • • •i disagree.
mainstream people have as much rights to their words as scientists, but mainstream is in the majority and AI will also continue to be abused by marketing to make outrageous claims.
i dont think AI helps anyone and i will continue to ignore anyone talking about AI
Simon Willison
in reply to 𝓼𝓮𝓻𝓪𝓹𝓪𝓽𝓱【ツ】☮(📍🇬🇧) • • •𝓼𝓮𝓻𝓪𝓹𝓪𝓽𝓱【ツ】☮(📍🇬🇧)
in reply to Simon Willison • • •The word AI does not help anyone with anything, because you also cant tell which version or part i even mean when saying that, hence it is just confusing. 😁
i just meant the term
Jim Gardner
in reply to 𝓼𝓮𝓻𝓪𝓹𝓪𝓽𝓱【ツ】☮(📍🇬🇧) • • •Simon Willison
in reply to Jim Gardner • • •𝓼𝓮𝓻𝓪𝓹𝓪𝓽𝓱【ツ】☮(📍🇬🇧)
in reply to Simon Willison • • •thanks. ...makes sense to me.
Kevin Bowrin ☕
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Joe
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Simon Willison
in reply to Joe • • •Joe
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Mario Angst
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Also, I still try to use SALAMI whenever I can ;).
Scott Jenson
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Simon Willison
in reply to Scott Jenson • • •@scottjenson Yeah, that's exactly why I was resistant to the term too - the "general public" (for want of a better term) knows what AI is, and it's Skynet / The Matrix / Data from Star Trek / Jarvis / Ultron
I decided to give the audience of my writing the benefit of the doubt that they wouldn't be confused by science fiction
Chip Warden
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Simon Willison
in reply to Chip Warden • • •@lgw4 I don't think they were wrong to coin a term in 1955 with a perfectly reasonable definition, then consistently apply that definition for nearly 70 years.
It's not their fault that science fiction redefined it from under them!
Chip Warden
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Simon Willison
in reply to Chip Warden • • •1872 novel by Samuel Butler
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)crazyeddie
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Tristan Harward
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Evan Hensleigh
in reply to Simon Willison • • •trdebunked
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Jeff Atwood
Unknown parent • • •Simon Willison
in reply to Jeff Atwood • • •Catching up on the weird world of LLMs
simonwillison.netSnowJ ❄️
in reply to Simon Willison • • •to me, the relationship between "AI" and "LLM/etc." feels somewhat akin to the relationship between "speed" and "velocity" in common usage.
It's not 1:1 or anything, but "AI" feels like it's in word-gruel territory more often. And it's probably fine if colloquial usage doesn't really care about how mushy that usage is.
Richard Sheridan
in reply to Jeff Atwood • • •Lol. Django among others. Aggressively building open tooling for LLM application. Mediocre dunk attempt. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Wi…
Computer programmer
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Jeff Atwood
Unknown parent • • •Simon Willison
in reply to Jeff Atwood • • •@codinghorror @richardsheridan I agree with you! These things are spicy autocomplete, they're not "artificial intelligence" in the science fiction definition
My argument here is that AI should mean what it's meant in academia since the 1950s, and we should reclaim it from science fiction
Jeff Atwood
in reply to Richard Sheridan • • •Jeff Atwood
in reply to Jeff Atwood • • •Jeff Atwood
in reply to Jeff Atwood • • •Jeff Atwood
in reply to Jeff Atwood • • •Simon Willison
in reply to Jeff Atwood • • •Glyph
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Glyph
in reply to Glyph • • •Carlana Johnson
in reply to Glyph • • •Simon Willison
in reply to Carlana Johnson • • •Glyph
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Simon Willison reshared this.
Glyph
in reply to Glyph • • •Simon Willison
in reply to Glyph • • •Glyph
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Simon Willison
in reply to Glyph • • •Glyph
in reply to Simon Willison • • •nen
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Gregory P. Smith (he/him) 🚲🦝
in reply to Simon Willison • • •The less you know the more confident you are. Just ask an LLM.
I intentionally avoid the term AI and advise other technically minded folks to do the same because it is a purely Marketing term. It will never have a meaningful definition.
Everything I've ever worked on to automate tasks with computers in the past 30 years would be called AI today by a Marketing Department despite none of it involving ML.
Their definition is "this term attracts attention and money", oriented around their goal. The lay person hearing it has a definition of "hype buzzword bingo score for Product Name". It doesn't communicate anything.
Elide the term AI from any context in which it gets used to describe something and it should still be just as meaningful. If not, nothing was being said.
Be right back. I'm gonna go hit Tab in my command line so the shell's AI can do what I want for me. 😛
@carlana @glyph
Janne Moren
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Has "AI" ever carried connotations of actual intelligence in the CS field? "AI" used to mean expert systems, logical inference, playing chess, "fuzzy logic", and so on and so on - none of which had any more to do with actual intelligence than deep neural networks.
Dаn̈ıel Раršlow 🥧
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Simon Willison
in reply to Dаn̈ıel Раršlow 🥧 • • •Simon Willison
in reply to Janne Moren • • •right: that's my point: AI is a term we have used since the 1950s for technology that "isn't actually intelligent", so there's plenty of precedent for using it that way
That's why we have the term "AGI"
Jeff Atwood
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Jeff Atwood
Unknown parent • • •Simon Willison
in reply to Jeff Atwood • • •@codinghorror @b_cavello just to clarify, I'm not a "AI is the best thing ever" hype-merchant - I have written extensively about the many downsides and flaws of modern AI
- simonwillison.net/2022/Sep/5/l…
- simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/10/…
- simonwillison.net/series/promp…
- simonwillison.net/tags/ai+ethi…
Exploring the training data behind Stable Diffusion
simonwillison.netit's B! Cavello 🐝
in reply to Jeff Atwood • • •it's B! Cavello 🐝
in reply to Simon Willison • • •aspendigital.org/report/ai-101…
I don’t take issue with the term “AI,” however, and I think that’s a handy alternative. Sisi Wei actually beat me to the punch on this in a recent #TalkBetterAboutAI conversation: youtu.be/KSsxuEtGgEg
A.I. 101 - Aspen Digital
Aspen DigitalSimon Willison
in reply to Jeff Atwood • • •Jeff Atwood
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Evan Prodromou
in reply to Simon Willison • • •three word chant
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Brantley Harris
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Simon Willison
in reply to Brantley Harris • • •It’s OK to call it Artificial Intelligence
simonwillison.netScott Langevin
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Simon Willison
Unknown parent • • •@deivudesu I'm personally unexcited about this ongoing quest for AGI - I just want useful tools, pretty much LLMs with some of the sharper edges filed off
If AGI ever does happen my hunch is that LLMs may form a small part of a larger system, but certainly wouldn't be the core of it
Ulrike Hahn
in reply to Simon Willison • • •bk
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Henning Deters
in reply to Simon Willison • • •But isn't there a difference between the research and "those things" (i.e. recent consumer products like bing chat etc., which are not research about intelligence but consumer products marketed as intelligent)?
Strypey
in reply to Simon Willison • • •"The most influential organizations building Large Language Models today are OpenAI, Mistral AI, Meta AI, Google AI and Anthropic. All but Anthropic have AI in the title; Anthropic call themselves “an AI safety and research company”. Could rejecting the term “AI” be synonymous with a disbelief in the value or integrity of this whole space?"
Rejecting those companies and their business models? Yes. For me "AI" is a marketing phrase and using it to describe #MOLE is doing unpaid PR work.
Large Heydon Collider
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Juan Luis
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Counterargument: daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/01/02…
"AI" as a term, like many other things, was a male ego thing. McCarthy: "I wished to avoid having either to accept Norbert (not Robert) Wiener as a guru or having to argue with him." en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histor…
"AI" is the biggest terminology stretch in the history of computing, and using it is "OK" only because everybody else is doing it, but that's a weak excuse.
overview of the history of artificial intelligence
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Simon Willison
in reply to Juan Luis • • •Simon Willison reshared this.
jeffsussna
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Martijn Faassen
in reply to Simon Willison • • •@astrojuanlu
I didn't know that either. I can see why one would want to disassociate symbolic AI from cybernetics, but of course there's an irony given where AI ended up. The trend towards connectionism in AI was already well underway by the early 90s, though; considering neural networks as AI is nothing new.
Karl Pettersson
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Frank Patz-Brockmann
in reply to Simon Willison • • •happyborg
in reply to Simon Willison • • •I think there is a point because something has changed. People are suddenly experiencing something uncannily like all the fictional AIs they've read about and watched in movies.
Many people, including plenty I expect to know better are seeing a conversational UX with a black box behind it, as opposed to a few lines of basic, and then make wildly overblown assumptions about what it is. Deliberately encouraged by those using deceptive framing such as 'hallucinations' to describe errors.
Chris Real
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Using words that have achieved common meaning through time (despite their origin) is how we are able to communicate.
This is a thoughtful justification, but it's also a support of common sense.
Jason_Dodd
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Simon Willison
Unknown parent • • •@tml yeah, that's a point that could be argued
I think LLMs fit the general research area of /trying/ to get machines to do that - in the same way that creating the LISP programming language was part of attempts to build towards that goal
Scott Francis
in reply to Simon Willison • • •wired: “AI isn’t actually intelligent”
tired: “crypto means cryptography”
expired: “actually it’s GNU/Linux”
in all cases, objectors are correct, but missing the point of general audience (as opposed to technical audience) communication.
Jeff Atwood
in reply to Simon Willison • • •The 2030 Self-Driving Car Bet
Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror)Sancho McCann
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Book Review: Atlas of AI
sanchom.github.ioSimon Willison
in reply to Jeff Atwood • • •Miguel de Icaza ᯅ🍉
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Andrew Feeney
in reply to Simon Willison • • •[object Object]
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Simon Willison
Unknown parent • • •Weird Gypsy Jazz? Adrian Holovaty’s “Melodic Guitar Music”
YouTubeKen Kinder
Unknown parent • • •Ken Kinder
in reply to Jeff Atwood • • •@codinghorror @richardsheridan Django Unchained (the movie) came many years later. So unless time travel is a thing, that seems unlikely.
But Jeff, seriously, besides being wrong, you’re being a massive jerk. Even if Simon hadn’t invented what is perhaps the world’s most popular web framework, would it matter? Is this who you are? Yelling “dO yOU kNoW wHo I am!?” to strangers on the internet?
Space Hobo
in reply to Ken Kinder • • •Category:Cultural depictions of Django Reinhardt - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org