Richard Jernigan -> RE: AI does not exist. (Sep. 21 2023 18:11:37)
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AI exists, and is employed in daliy use by much of the population. Like most neologisms made from pre-existing words, "artificial intelligence" is open to serious misinterpretation. Mathematicians are used to this, so are physicists. I have followed AI, sometimes closely, sometimes rather loosely, since the early 1960s. In early days "artificial intelligence" was routinely ridiculed as "genuine stupidity." But in recent years a lot of progress has been made employing machines in such fields as speech recognition, image sorting, and so on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence Although I use, nearly daily, the computerized speech recognition which often answers the telephone, and Google Translate, Google Search and other AI applications, i remain conscious of the limitations of even such impressive apps as ChatGPT, which has passed the Bar Exam in at least one state. ChatGPT still comes up with fantasies or outright falsehoods. What's impressive about it is its ability to come up with long stretches of coherent, believable text using such easily described concepts--unrelated to the usual descriptions of human intelligence. Do these same concepts underlie much of human intelligence? ¿Quién sabe? Machines remain incapable of full human intelligence. I wonder whether they are capable even of the problem solving capabilities of apes or ravens. But examples of practical AI exhibit profound progress since the early 1960s. As a grad student I worked at the University of Texas Linguistics Research Center. It spent $millions per year trying to translate languages via computer. My good friend and colleague David Senechalle (RIP) called it the "Linguistics Berserk Center." He used to say, "If we had a computer with infinite storage which could do everything at once, we still wouldn't know how to program it." Eventually people gave up on the deterministic generative grammar approach employed by the Linguistics Berserk Center. Translating from English to Russian and back again produced such hilarious results as "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak"==>"The soul is strong but the meat is rancid." These days I regularly rely upon Google Translate to interpret swathes of Japanese or Thai characters into English. I do it because Google does such a good job with languages I know. I will regularly post a Google translation from Spanish to English, maybe editing only a word or two, or altering a word-for-word rendering into something more idiomatic. Google's technique is accurately described as AI, in the technical sense of the phrase. The app is trained on large bodies of translated text, and works accurately on texts it has never seen before. But if I want a brief translation from Russian, I still ask Larisa. In this task, I trust her English better than Google's. And I can ask her about nuance. So AI exists, and is widely employed practically, but the word "intelligence" in the phrase "artificial intelligence" doesn't mean the same thing as when it applies to a human, an ape or a raven. RNJ
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