Not Everything is AI!

Ah, yes. We are in the Artificial Intelligence age. The media and marketing departments of every company that’s remotely aligned with electronics and software are leeching off this AI terminology.

 Of course, I’m certain that you are smarter than this. Not everything marketed as AI has anything close to the technical prowess of today’s most advanced generative models. And even the advanced generative models like GPT are not artificial intelligence in the sense that they possess true reasoning skills, an ability to think, or some sort of consciousness. This isn’t to say these models aren’t incredibly impressive. With an immense amount of processing power and some extremely talented engineers, they’ve developed systems which can analyze a massive percentage of content on the open internet and use it to predict what images, text, or other media to generate based on complex and inconsistent input. This leads to all sorts of new powerful applications, along with countless ethical, societal, and legal challenges.

I understand that words change meaning and there may not be an exact scientific definition for what constitutes artificial intelligence. Generative artificial intelligence is really just an incredibly complex system based on machine learning, statistics, and computer science. In fact, it’s so complex that even the engineers who built the models can’t easily explain how it all works or even understand how the models come to the final decisions or output they create for any given input. These systems mimic artificial intelligence, and perhaps as they improve, we’ll get to a point where they’re undistinguishable from our science fiction based notion of true AI.  I’m OK with calling these systems AI and I’m truly amazed with how impressive and useful these systems can be.

Now let’s return to the fact that annoys me. Not everything is AI. A lot of things marketed as AI are really just regular old computer algorithms. Some may be more complex than others, but you’d be kidding yourself if you think the “AI” your robotic vacuum cleaner uses to get around your living room is the same as the AI that OpenAI developed with billions of dollars in computing power and engineering. That’s like taking a horse and marketing it as a Tesla. It’s ridiculous.

While I don’t think generative AI is a tech craze that we’ll just forget about, like cryptocurrency and NFTs, I believe the term needs to be reeled in a bit. Calling anything and everything AI devalues the term and detracts from the actual accomplishment of true generative AI models. That anyone marketing technology can slap the AI label on their dumb products and make more profit from it is simply stupid. As a society, let’s stop letting dumb people get away with marketing crap like this.

*Robot vacuum image for this article totally generated with AI.

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