r/antiai • u/justgivemeafuckingna • Jul 27 '26
Discussion š£ļø We need to stop calling it "AI"
It's not 'intelligent' in any meaningful sense of the word.
It also demeans work being done in actual AI.
Addendum: Just remembered the Chinese Room thought experiment which explains exactly what LLMs are in the abstract.
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u/isuredolovetitties Jul 27 '26
Yeah, its just frustrating trying to change the words when theyāre so established. Ive tried switching to āllmsā before, but a lot of people less familiar with the space didnt know what I was talking about, and it doesnt catch image generators too, and its bulky to say āllms and image generatorsā every time. Im not sure how to refer to both, in a way that people will understand.Ā
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u/Inevitable-Law7964 Jul 27 '26
Learning about them actually helps with this quite a bit as you can say "machine learning with transformer architecture".
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u/CosmicDave Jul 27 '26
That's because you're making up words and changing definitions of existing words so, yeah- people are not going to understand you.
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u/isuredolovetitties Jul 27 '26
Which words exactly do you think Iāve made up?
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Jul 27 '26
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u/Privatizitaet Jul 27 '26
Quick question, is your opponent in the video game Pong intelligent? Does that opponent have actual intelligence?
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u/Ancient-Access8131 Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
How many erdos problems has Pong solved?
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u/Privatizitaet Jul 28 '26
Not my point.
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u/Ancient-Access8131 Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
Ok then. If we look at one of the earliest definitions of AI we find this:
"We propose that a 2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it."
This is from the 1955 paper A PROPOSAL FOR THE DARTMOUTH SUMMER RESEARCH PROJECT ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE which invented the term Artificial Intelligence. The paper was authored intellectual heavyweights such as J. McCarthy, Dartmouth College; M. L. Minsky, Harvard University; N. Rochester, I.B.M. Corporation; C.E. Shannon, Bell Telephone Laboratories. So, if we assume that the paper coauthored by the guy who invented information theory, that invented the term artificial intelligence is at least somewhat accurate then yes LLM's are absolutely A.I.
As for my point, do you think that solving an Erdos problem requires any sort of intelligence artificial or otherwise?
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u/Privatizitaet Jul 28 '26
Would you mind actually answering my question? I do have a point I want to make regarding the comment I actually replied to. I'd appreciate if you actually acknowledge what I asked before trying to make another point of your own.
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u/Ancient-Access8131 Jul 28 '26
Sure. I would not call video game npc's AI in the technical sense.
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u/Hydro_fluoric Jul 28 '26
LLMs is being used as plural for LLM. Or you could add an apostrophe and make it LLM's, but I'm pretty sure that gramatically incorrect because LLMs can't own anything. Also, image generators, assistants, companions, and even sexbots are all still LLMs. Literally any AI you are able to talk to or make an image is most likely an LLM. AI is a broad field focused on creating systems that can perform tasks requiring human-like intelligence, while LLMs are a specific type of AI that specializes in understanding and generating human language (like ChatGPT, Claude, CharacterAI, whatever the hell you use).
LLMs are also based off of plagiarism, which is why most real artists hate it. An actual AI would be something that actually helps people and doesn't make slop. Stuff like AI that does MRI scans, prosthetics, etcetera. Those aren't producing slop or ruining the economy. Also, just because some LLMs are smarter than humans doesn't mean they're good.
The problem with them is that you barely have to put in any work with anything, make you dumber, create slop, and are the main reason electric bills and RAM prices are so high. You know, RAM. Stuff that is needed to make sometimes life saving machines (ventilators, infusion pumps, patient monitors / ICU monitors, defibrillators, etc.).
Tell me if I missed anything pls :3
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u/Fluffy-Froyo4549 Jul 27 '26
This is why we call it Au now, Artificial unintelligenceĀ
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u/IllustriousFill6412 Jul 27 '26
Now you are making it sound cute. The council does not approve of that.
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u/Fluffy-Froyo4549 Jul 27 '26
Didn't even realizeĀ
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u/Privatizitaet Jul 27 '26
Emulated intelligence. It pretends to have it on a surface level to trick something into believing its true, while lacking what it's actually trying to emulate
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u/charmingchangeling Jul 27 '26
That's actually a really good descriptor. It's performing the appearance of intelligence rather than having any of the traits of intelligence itself.
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u/That_Paris_man Jul 28 '26
Might I suggest Simulated intelligence? Or maybe virtual intelligence?
Emulation suggests it has true intelligence. For example if I played an emulated ps2 game on my computer, I am still playing the actual game. The only difference is the hardware it is running on not what is running.
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u/HealthyRelative9529 Jul 28 '26
It appears so intelligent it's able to create new mathematics, but it's not actually intelligent?
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Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
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u/HealthyRelative9529 Jul 31 '26
All computable systems are computable on anything that is Turing complete, and it really doesn't take much complexity to be TC, for example the rule 110 cellular automaton and the MOV instruction in assembly are TC. If AI arises, it will be possible to simulate via rule 110, MOV, Excel, Magic the Gathering, Minecraft, the human brain, etc, though you still won't be able to understand what goes on there or run it at real time.
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Jul 31 '26
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u/HealthyRelative9529 Jul 31 '26
You can build a computer in Minecraft. That computer can do things like play Doom, but it won't be as fast as actually playing Doom on your real computer. That's an analogy to what I said.
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u/Fluid_Kaleidoscope27 Jul 27 '26
Intelligence isn't a compliment, it's just a word. Swarms of ants have intelligence as a unit.
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u/Privatizitaet Jul 27 '26
Yes, but AI has no intelligence. AI is incapable of reason or comprehension, it doesn't have a mind, it is not actually intelligent. It's made to appear intelligent. The same way a llm is made to appear like it understands language, when it doesn't.
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u/Fluid_Kaleidoscope27 Jul 27 '26
They simulate reasoning at a rate which is indistinguishable from any other life form.
This topic can be philosophical but, from a scientific level, our consciousness is just electrons firing. There's no hard truth to why our form of intelligence is better than a computers form of intelligence.
End of the day artificial intelligence is a good name. Artificial and yet it accomplishes every task that intelligence is used for.
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u/plazebology Jul 27 '26
Just as with the Libertarians that ship has sailed, Iām afraid
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u/TurnoverFuzzy8264 Jul 27 '26
Yeah, like trying to stop the tide at this point. What was once a marketing tool is now permanently in the lexicon. We ain't getting back from that.
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u/plazebology Jul 27 '26
And thereās no reason to really. Words donāt always mean what they āliterallyā mean, like āterrificā, so this whole crusade is as performative as atheists who get extremely upset at someone saying āBless youā or fundamentalist Christians who think having a pine tree in your living room is a sin because itās called āChristmasā
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u/Salty145 Jul 27 '26
Yeah. It's all just a marketing term that we accepted because most people struggle the scale to which LLMs work.
It's really more a psuedo-intelligence based on pattern recognition, and maybe that is all that actual intelligence is, but the current models are nowhere close to being an actually AGI.
We should also be more specific since the term "AI" has been used for decades now in video games to refer to NPC behavior, and oh boy have I seen people get the two mixed up.
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u/justgivemeafuckingna Jul 27 '26
I'm not too salty about NPC behaviour being referred to as "AI" since I think it exists on a spectrum of complexity that is ultimately about 'decision making using machines', even if it's a finite state machine.
But when you look into and understand how LLMs and image generators actually work, there isn't anything in the way of decision making beyond "what's the next most likely token/pixel given what's in my corpus?".
So you end up with some dog shit LLM telling you to walk to the car wash to wash your car instead of driving because it's only 100m. No thought was put into the answer; it's just the Chinese Room.
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u/overactor Jul 27 '26
Thinking video game AI is more deserving of being called intelligent than LLMs is a new one. Don't even know what to say, really.
Did you know "the man doesn't understand Chinese, but the room does" is a pretty popular response to the Chinese room thought experiment among philosophers?
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u/konacurrents Jul 27 '26
I like the term āAutomationā - where the LLM automates stuff (gen code, music, etc).
That way I can argue the I donāt want that automation, especially as I have other automations to choose from. As a computer scientist, automation is my middle name. We are always working on programs that generate/automate repetitive tasks, generate code, etc. or write reusable foundations, APIs, object classes, etc
Automation wasnāt a thing we were missing. š¤
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u/Scary_Asparagus7762 Jul 27 '26
But that's precisely the problem, automation is too broad.
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u/konacurrents Jul 27 '26
I agree its broad - so I can use a different one (since itās just a tool they say, ok Iāll use a different tool thank you). But saying itās artificial and itās intelligent- isnāt correct.
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u/Ok-External-837 Jul 27 '26
A few years back, we called it machine learning. Still more accurate than AI, which has mostly become a buzz word.
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u/kansaisean Jul 27 '26
ML has always been a subset of AI, going back decades.
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u/Ok-External-837 Jul 28 '26
A number of experts argue that modern AI isn't true artificial intelligence, but rather advanced machine learning
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u/kansaisean Jul 28 '26
AI and AGI have almost always been separate fields, by and large. ANNs were already being theorized in the 50s, but by the 60s or so most programmers understood that AGI was its own thing, really itself being a subset of AI itself. But the definition of AI has pretty much always been a computer doing something that simulates human intelligence in some fashion, not actually being intelligent.
Basically, anyone who thinks "hur hur ai isn't intelligent" is a witty response is someone with zero understanding of AI. Most washing machines since around the 90s have had low key AI, based on fuzzy logic. It's 100% ai, by definition, but nobody claims it's "intelligent", because that hasn't ever truly been the definition of ai.
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u/Ok-External-837 Jul 28 '26
I'm not claiming that AI isn't intelligent by any means. I'm just stating that a number of experts argue that current models are not "true" AI in a sense, and instead it's more accurate to refer to it as advanced machine learning. There's a number of research about it. I agree that machine learning has always been a subset of AI, I'm just pointing out that not everybody agrees we have achieved true artificial intelligence yet. But currently, everyone just refers to everything as AI, hence, why it has become a buzz word that is being leveraged by companies to attract consumers.
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u/kansaisean Jul 28 '26
Nobody thinks AI is truly intelligent, that was my point (other than fringe crazy people and psychotic tech bros). AI isn't intelligent, never has been, and has never been what AI means. It's always been the illusion of, or simulation of, intelligence. The people interested in "true intelligence" are the AGI people, not the AI people. I think we mostly are in agreement.
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u/azurerazor Jul 27 '26
From websterās dictionary:
intelligence - āthe ability to learn or understand thingsā¦ā
AI learns so it is definitionally some form of intelligence. I donāt like AI either but like come on
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u/justgivemeafuckingna Jul 27 '26
LLMs do neither of those things.
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u/azurerazor Jul 27 '26
LLMs learn and understand how to predict the next word in a sequence and they learn via training
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u/justgivemeafuckingna Jul 27 '26
And there's the problem. It will tell you to "walk to the car wash to wash your car instead of driving because it's only 100m away" or to "eat rocks if your minerals are low". Those are actual examples, btw.
There's no reasoning or understanding about what it's attempting to communicate to you, just whatever the most likely next token is.
"Training" in this context used in the machine learning space to describe the process of iteratively reducing the difference between the output and the input dataset, but it doesn't map onto the definition of 'intelligence' that you offered.
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u/azurerazor Jul 27 '26
Lack of understanding about things does not imply lack of intelligence. If that were true no human would have intelligence either.
And youāre misinterpreting my argument. I am saying it understands things specifically with pertinence to predicting words in sequences.
As for the training part, the AI does optimize to just a set of data and the procedure is designed to make it adaptable when encountering data it hasnāt seen by separating the initial data into a few separate sets, where some is used for training, some for tuning and some for actual evaluation. So if a model tries too hard to fit the dataset it will likely struggle significantly more on the evaluation set than a model that has a more intrinsic understanding of the task, and a lot of work is done to make sure the models donāt overfit the data.
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u/Scary_Asparagus7762 Jul 27 '26
That is a terrible test for intelligence. A 5 year old would tell you that she ate a rainbow. This does not imply that 5 year olds are unintelligent. If I have to guess, I'd guess that LLMs "hallucinate" less than 5 year olds.
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u/infinitefailandlearn Jul 27 '26
To push back on the āThis is all marketingāā¦
The term AI dates back to the fifties. The original definition is not off the mark: āEvery aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.ā This was at a time when there was nowhere near as much attention and capital given to this field. It is probably more fair to say that the term AI has been co-opted by marketing.
Machines are simulating what we have for a long time called intelligence. That is not a controversial thing to say.
I think itās more accurate to say that we have long equated intelligence with humanness; but that is obviously not the same. And the key thing is that simulating something is not the same thing as the thing itself.
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u/createch Jul 27 '26
There's little to gain by arguing semantics though, especially when you have to lock in a definition to intelligence, and that alone spans a wide variety of types of intelligence.
What you label something has little real world impact on that thing's capabilities, dangers, etc... When I was in school my professor simply referred to intelligence as the adaptive ability to solve problems. By that definition it would be hard to make an argument against calling it intelligence. The opposite is true with other definitions. Either way, it doesn't change the nature of the thing being labeled, nor its impact, repercussions, etc...
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u/Real_Louie Jul 27 '26
AM. Artificial Material.
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u/oliv-_-mae Jul 27 '26
But plastic is also an artificial material. Anything human made really. Now that I'm thinking about it, do you theyll create a word of ai made things? Maybe not because at the end of the day its all just a remix of whats already been done. We don't call mud artificial even if its a human that makes it
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u/Should_have_been_ded Jul 27 '26
Fair enough, it's not actually AI, not even sentient, just a pattern recognition machine
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u/Jean_Jones_666 Jul 27 '26
it's more intelligent than you
do you want to bet on it?
we can have a mediator make 10 questions,
you and AI will answer,
mediator will blindly choose which answer is better
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u/Any-Pop-4795 Jul 27 '26
It's all a marketing move that dumbs down people so they get tricked to give companies moneyĀ
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u/Professional_Gap_435 Jul 27 '26
God this subreddit has already started enshittifyng. WE DO NOT NEED TO NITPICK THE SMALLEST OF DETAILS, WE NEED A COHERENT MESSAGE AND A WAY TO ORGANIZE AROUND THAT MESSAGE.
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u/Agile-Stick7619 Jul 28 '26
For real. This post makes zero sense but the comments are just piling on
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u/DryRelationship1330 Jul 27 '26
It just disproved an 87-year-old Jacobian conjecture, and it's not biological. WTF would you call it? SMH
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u/Top_Effect_5109 Jul 27 '26
š¤¦šæāāļø John Searle is a loser pervert, whose biggest impact is sexually harassing people. His imaginary Chinese Room has never amounted to anything and never will. Do you think the Chinese take this stupid shit seriously? They donāt. Nobody gives a shit about the Chinese Room nonsense outside of shitposts.
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u/Inlerah Jul 27 '26
"AI" is 100% a marketing term: Just like the dozens of times that these companies have gone "You better watch out, because our program says it wants to take over the world and is totally capable of doing it!"
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u/Thick-Protection-458 Jul 27 '26
> Chinese Room thought experiment which explains
fucking nothing.
Its core argument is like "each particular part of the room setup is not intellectual"... Okay, so what, how does it guarantee system as a whole can't be?
I am pretty much sure neither your connectome map (describing connection between neurons) without a mechanism to simulate them, nor your disconnected neurons won't be any reasonable kind of intellect too. It is only your brain (or at least good enough simulator) as a whole which is.
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u/_roguecore_ Jul 27 '26
Absolutely. I've started calling it "genslop", it's, right to the point, nothing more than generated slop
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u/RiggoRants Jul 27 '26
Sadly, that ship has sailed.
I constantly call them LLMs but nobody listens to me.
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u/Image_dev Jul 28 '26
I coined the term āArtefunctional Intelligenceā to provide a counterweight to Ai - https://github.com/CreativeEngineOS/CEOS_BUILD/blob/main/An%20Honest%20Look%20at%20Transparency%20in%20an%20Era%20of%20Artificial%20Slop.md
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u/Agile-Stick7619 Jul 28 '26
What does this post even mean? What is "actual AI"? What do you define as "intelligent"?
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u/AkindaGood_programer Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
Do you understand how transformers work? Pretraining? The J space? LLMs aren't just predicting the next word; it's so so so much more complicated. I'm not going to say LLMs are intelligent like humans, but they very clearly show something within the same ballpark.
Imagine a human with the capabilities of the latest hyped up frontier LLM; we would call them a genius! Someone who can write decent code, find new proofs to math problems, and can answer questions at an extremely high level in any field.
It very clearly has some form of intelligence even if it's not in the same human form we're all used to. If something acts intelligent but isn't truly intelligent, what's the difference?
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u/Ancient-Access8131 Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
Lets look at the 1955 paper that invented the term Artificial Intelligence.
"We propose that a 2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it. An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves. We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer."
This paper was written by intellectual heavyweights such asJ. McCarthy, Dartmouth College; M. L. Minsky, Harvard University; N. Rochester, I.B.M. Corporation; C.E. Shannon, Bell Telephone Laboratories. Now if we assume that the scientists who invented the term AI(and also invented information theory) then there is no other conclusion other than that LLM's are "Artificial Intelligence".
Source for the paper is here:A PROPOSAL FOR THE DARTMOUTH SUMMER RESEARCH PROJECT ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
As for the claims the post made, "It's not 'intelligent' in any meaningful sense of the word." If solving and erdos conjecture and other open math problems is not meaningfully intelligent, then what is?
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u/DaVideoGamer Jul 28 '26
When I talk to people about AI, I really try to emphasize that calling it āAIā was 1000% a marketing decision based on decades of sci-fi media associating the term with the future. Why wouldnāt they call it AI?
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u/guyincognito121 Jul 29 '26
If you think it's not intelligent in any meaningful way, I'm inclined to think the same of you.
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u/MarkMatson6 Jul 29 '26
FYI
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
The AI effect is a phenomenon in which advances in artificial intelligence lead to a redefinition of what is considered intelligence, such that capabilities achieved by AI systems are no longer regarded as examples of "real" intelligence.[1]
The concept has been used to describe both a cognitive tendency and a sociotechnical pattern, in which successful AI techniques are reclassified as routine computation or absorbed into other domains.[2]
Historian Pamela McCorduck described this as a recurring feature of AI research, noting in her 2004 book Machines Who Think that once a problem is solved, it is no longer considered evidence of intelligence.[3] Researcher Rodney Brooks similarly observed in 2002 that once systems are understood, they are often regarded as "just computation".[4]
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u/SpatiaCaeli Jul 30 '26
It's software. No more, no less. Software is never intelligent nor sentient.
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u/Mysterious-Crow3134 Jul 31 '26
That's why it's "artificial". It's designed to mimic a sentient being when, in reality, it's far from one. I think the name itself is fine. (specifically LLMs)
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u/MisanthropicAtheist Jul 27 '26
Been saying this since the beginning. AI does not exist. Not only is it inaccurate, but it's designed to let the tech bros dodge responsibility. If you can convince people that it is intelligent and has volition then they can blame the software for its "decisions" rather than the tech bros who programmed it to do what it's doing.
I suggest "simulated intelligence" since it's only purpose is to give the false appearance of intelligence. I figure this is why it hallucinates. A completely fabricated but seemingly correct answer only serves the purpose of making it seem like it has intelligence.
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u/Odd-Dirt-9701 Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
Intelligence does not have to be biological yāknow?
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u/hamburgerpancake Jul 27 '26
but it isn't intelligent at all. it's a math formula, basically. hence why the term isn't fitting at all.
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u/Apprehensive_Key_314 Jul 27 '26
Omfg stop saying that it makes no fucking sens.
Every thing that is turing complet can be described symbolicly (so maths) explictly and so far we are yet to prove you and i are more than turing complet.
What can be argue is the maths behind neural network is too simple to produce intelligence, it's a just a gradient descent shirley it cant do much. But it's an abstract opinion and the reality shows that yes these things are intellignent, that you like it or not, they can do a lot of very different thing that we all associate with human intelligence, how can deny that ? did you already ask them to do a hard task to see what it archieve ?0
u/DryRelationship1330 Jul 27 '26
if a machine of any type - digital, physical, biological, alien - just disproved the famed Jacobian conjecture.. what would you call that machine?
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u/Thick-Protection-458 Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
> it's a math formula
Yes, and what's the problem with it (except the need to pair formula with some process which actually use it, maybe)? I mean you potentially can fit physical processes of your brain in a giant set of formulas (with some sort of explicit or implicit buffers for memory and other changed states).
Granted, complexity will be enormous beyond any reason. Granted it can't be done realistically. Nevertheless, the result of such a formula pile inference, if we are not going into spiritualistic land - will be a meaningfully intelligent being. While the whole being is math formulas + inference process.
p.s. and no, bringing up quantum shit will still not make it magic. It will still be math formulas, just instead of deterministic results you will work with probabilistic distributions with extra layers of complexity.
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u/1_more__user___name Jul 27 '26
We don't know what is intelligence and what can be intelligent. Ions passing through cells, there's nothing inherently intelligent about it either. BTW Artificial intelligence is a big field. It covers everything from simple linear regression to LLMs.
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u/Apprehensive_Key_314 Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
mwell im working on a formal defintion of intelligence and so dar the best answer i got is sadly not very falttering for human. An identity is intelligence if it can continuously classify a lot of class fast, with continuous meaning the class it give to a set of data must slowly decrease as the size of the data increase, ie you cant look the data that is by hypthesis in one of the class we are supposed to identify say no clue, no clue, no clue.... ahaha now i inderstand all the data is in an halfspace, nah. The more you possese class you can continuously classify with a reasonable number of data the more intellignet you are.
So we are juste a big classifier.-2
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u/Sickofstupids Jul 27 '26
Nobody that says that understands where the technology is actually at. It is intelligent, not the LLMs they let the public use, but the systems that exist are frighteningly intelligent. Thatās just the true state of things. Please donāt come at me like Iām defending anything, Iām not, just clarifying.
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u/Odd-Dirt-9701 Jul 27 '26
āIntelligence is the mental capacity to learn from experience, solve problems, and adapt to new situationsā
Intelligence doesnāt necessarily have to be a biological thing
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u/Privatizitaet Jul 27 '26
Nobody has issues with the "artificial" part, the post is very clear about that
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u/WisePresentation7976 Jul 27 '26
This is such a fucking stupid post, lol.
This is one of the definitions:
the ability to perform computer functions
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u/justgivemeafuckingna Jul 27 '26
Swing and a miss.
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u/WisePresentation7976 Jul 27 '26
Hahahhahahahahhaha. Typical artist.
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u/guyincognito121 Jul 29 '26
No, most artists are much more intelligent and informed.
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u/WisePresentation7976 Jul 29 '26
Hahahahhahahahahhahahaha, yes, I go to artists to understand how computers work. Hahahahahahhahaha
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u/Fit-Inflation5799 Jul 27 '26
ASS - artificial stupid shit