this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
1072 points (96.0% liked)
Technology
60123 readers
2725 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
As I said, call it a parrot if you want, denigrate its capabilities, really lean in to how dumb and mindless you think it is. That will just make things worse when it's doing a better job than the humans who previously ran that call center you're talking to for assistance with whatever, or when it's got whatever sort of co-writer byline equivalent the studios end up developing to label AI participation on your favourite new TV show.
How good are you at drawing hands? Hands are hard to draw, you know. And the latest AIs are actually getting pretty good at them.
It is accurate to call it a parrot in the context of it essentially being used as ambiguated plagiarism machines to avoid paying workers.
Yes it is capable of that. Yes that word means something else in the actual field. But you need to understand people are talking about this technology as it's political relationships with power, and pretending prioritizing that form of analysis is well thats just people being uninformed about the REAL side and that's their fault is yourself missing the point. This isn't about pride and hurt feelings that a robot is doing something human do. It's about the fact it's a tool to undermine the entire value of the creative sector. And these big companies aren't calling it AI because it's an accurate descriptor. It could also be called a generative language model. They are calling it that because the common misunderstanding of the term is valuable to hype culture and VC investment. Like it or not, the average understanding of the term carries different weight than it does inside the field. And it turns the conversation into a pretty stupid one about sentience and humanity, as well as legitimizing the practice by trying to argue this is fundamentally unenforceable from the regulations we have on plagiarism, which it really isn't.
People who are trying to rebrand it aren't doing it because they misunderstand the technical usage of the word AI. They are arguing the terminology is playing into the goals of our (hopefully shared) political enemies, who are trying to bulldoze a technology that they think should get special privileges: by implying the technology is something it isn't. This is about optics and social power, and the term "AI" is contributing to further public misunderstand how it actually works, which is something we should oppose.
A generative language model is a kind of artificial intelligence. Similar to how a parrot is a kind of bird. They are calling it artificial intelligence because it is artificial intelligence, you're the one who's insisting on redefining a word that has been in use this way for many decades.
That's not how they work. Maybe learn a bit more about the field before telling the people working in it how to name things.