this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
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AI

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence demonstrated by machines, unlike the natural intelligence displayed by humans and animals, which involves consciousness and emotionality. The distinction between the former and the latter categories is often revealed by the acronym chosen.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Can't stop people calling it AI. People have called video game bots AI since the 90s, even in industry. Any algorithm is a form of artificial intelligence, really. LLMs and machine vision are multipurpose, though I agree that general-purpose is still a stretch.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Why wouldn't agents in video games be AI, though? Things like are pathfinding, search, and behaviour trees are commonly used for agents in games, and in computer science these are widely considered to be artificial intelligence techniques. It's unlikely that you would find a CS textbook calling the Fast Fourier Transform AI though, or things like Bresenham's Line Drawing algorithm.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Absolutely. I wouldn't call Bresenham AI. In some contexts, like games, I might call A* search AI. But to someone from the Victorian era who paid people to compute taylor series by hand, something basic and flexible like a microprocessor which can run bresenham or FFT or etc. etc. ... might have been seen as artificial intelligence. Using a machine to solve a problem that normally requires human brainpower.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Seriously, the field of artificial intelligence has been around since the beginning of computer science, since Alan Turing founded it after coming up with the modern computer. Frankly, if you ask me, anyone complaining about LLMs being referred to as AI has been watching too many movies. AI != Human-but-metal and it never has. Going by the Wikipedia article, to be considered AI, a machine just has to perceive it's environment and learn - degree notwithstanding.

Of course this definition is pretty vague, so in practice AI tends to refer to the cutting edge of flexible computer algorithms. Many now-mundane algorithms much simpler than today's LLMs (like A* and genetic algorithms) were once considered AI for their flexible logic. At some point the Internet decided that it doesn't count unless it's literally Jarvis, but that's a very stingy definition of a very broad field.