Not sure if this is the best community to post in; please let me know if there’s a more appropriate one. AFAIK Aii@programming.dev is meant for news and articles only.
Not sure if this is the best community to post in; please let me know if there’s a more appropriate one. AFAIK Aii@programming.dev is meant for news and articles only.
AI is a super broad field that encompasses so many tech. It is not limited to the whatever the tech CEOs are pushing.
In this comment section alone, we see a couple examples of AI used in practical ways.
On a more personal level, surely you’d have played video games before? If you had to face any monster / bot opponents / etc, those are all considered AI. Depending on the game, stages / maps / environments may be procedurally generated - using AI techniques!
There are many more examples - e.g. pathfinding in map apps, translation apps -, just that we are all so familiar with them that we stopped thinking of them as AI.
So there are plenty of evidence for AI’s usefulness.
Langton’s ant can procedurally generate things, if you set it up right. Would you call that AI?
As for enemies in gaming, it got called that because game makers wanted to give the appearance of intelligence in enemy encounters. Aspirationally cribbing a word from sci-fi. It could just as accurately have been called “puppet behavior”… more accurately, really.
The point is “AI” is not a useful word. A bunch of different disciplines across computing all use it to describe different things, each trying to cash in on the cultural associations of a term that comes from fiction.
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I think what people are struggling to articulate is that, the way AI gets thrown around now, it’s basically being used as a replacement for the word “algorithm”.
It’s obfuscating the truth that this is all (relatively) comprehensible mathematics. Even the black box stuff. Just because the programmer doesn’t know each step the end program takes, doesn’t mean they don’t know the principals behind how it was made, or didn’t make deliberate choices to shape the outcome.
There’s some very neat mathematics, yes, and an utterly staggering amount of data and hardware. But at the end of the day its still just an (large) algorithm. Calling it AI is dubious at best, and con-artistry at worst.
Fair enough. I was using the new colloquial definition of AI which actually mean LLMs specifically.
I thing the broader AI which includes ML and all your other examples are indeed very useful.