Last year, someone (specifically, OUP) asked me to write an encyclopedia entry for "AI".
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In the end, this was a fun project to work on, especially through the readings I got to revisit (and sometimes read for the first time) in the process.
Where & when will it be published?
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"The term “AI” resists definition because it is continually reappropriated by people to mean different things. This, in turn, means that discussions of AI that do not provide working definitions for the purposes at hand risk incoherence. [...]
Accordingly, this article does not provide a definition of the term “AI” but rather explores various ways in which the idea of AI has been used to organize how people understand our world, allocate resources, and relate to each other."
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@emilymbender I really love the framing around "understand our world, allocate resources and relate to each other". It‘s short and yet it really teases at the social values of technology and also just the social power of the meanings of language (which I‘ve recently been learning a lot about for discourse analysis)
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"The term “AI” resists definition because it is continually reappropriated by people to mean different things. This, in turn, means that discussions of AI that do not provide working definitions for the purposes at hand risk incoherence. [...]
Accordingly, this article does not provide a definition of the term “AI” but rather explores various ways in which the idea of AI has been used to organize how people understand our world, allocate resources, and relate to each other."
>>
@emilymbender back in the late 80s I recall much discussion about there being 7 problems that AI in some form would address. One, oddly, was speech synthesis. Another, more reasonably, was speech recognition (note: not understanding, more like transcribing). Image recognition was in there and I forget the others. I think your approach is more useful.
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1. AI Is a Research Field
2. AI Is an Approach to Cognitive Science
3. AI Is a Parlor Trick
4. AI Is an Ideology
5. AI Is a Way to Hide and Devalue Human Labor
6. AI Is a Way to Shift Accountability
7. AI Is a Way to Centralize Power>>
@emilymbender And remember:
Everything is a way to:
- Shift Accountability
- Centralize Power
- etcIF THERE IS FREE LUNCH, YOU ARE THE DINNER!
(nothing commercially given for free & all is manipulation without good sense)
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Last year, someone (specifically, OUP) asked me to write an encyclopedia entry for "AI". I've just finished reviewing the copy edits, so hopefully it will be in the world soon. Meanwhile, a teaser:
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@emilymbender AI is our last warning.
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AI _SHOULD_ be an approach to Cognitive Science. The parts af AI that aren't have nothing to do with intelligence.
But, careful there. The folks doing domain modelling (Go, chess, protein folding, gradient decent) are reasonable comp. sci. stuff. (Although calling that stuff "AI" is completely ridiculous.)
It's LLMs that are exactly and only parlor tricks.
But the incredibly-stupidity-dense clusterfrack that AI has become is embarassing.
Well, the original intent of the term was extremely dishonest, so I would argue that the modern appropriations of the term for dishonest ends are actually failry genuine, and it was the poor sods using it for genuine approaches who got fooled and used to provide the term with legitimacy.
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AI _SHOULD_ be an approach to Cognitive Science. The parts af AI that aren't have nothing to do with intelligence.
But, careful there. The folks doing domain modelling (Go, chess, protein folding, gradient decent) are reasonable comp. sci. stuff. (Although calling that stuff "AI" is completely ridiculous.)
It's LLMs that are exactly and only parlor tricks.
But the incredibly-stupidity-dense clusterfrack that AI has become is embarassing.
@djl @emilymbender that is not how words or definitions work.
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@djl @emilymbender that is not how words or definitions work.
@claudius Can you say more what you mean - I didn't understand what you mean / referring to.
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@claudius Can you say more what you mean - I didn't understand what you mean / referring to.
@collective_truth just because the stem word is "Intelligence" does not mean that everything combined with that word is exactly that. Or that one particular field of study should own it.
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In the end, this was a fun project to work on, especially through the readings I got to revisit (and sometimes read for the first time) in the process.
@emilymbender Funny, I've previously thought, "But how do you formally define it?" Because in isolation, 'artificial' implies it's _not_ intelligence, rather than what it _is_.
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Last year, someone (specifically, OUP) asked me to write an encyclopedia entry for "AI". I've just finished reviewing the copy edits, so hopefully it will be in the world soon. Meanwhile, a teaser:
>>
@emilymbender whenever I discuss “AI” I always make it clear that it is a marketing term.
It is a way to obfuscate what the computer is actually doing, which when it’s not relying on probability, is mostly plagiarizing. When used for coding, it is doing database retrieval, often poorly.
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"The term “AI” resists definition because it is continually reappropriated by people to mean different things. This, in turn, means that discussions of AI that do not provide working definitions for the purposes at hand risk incoherence. [...]
Accordingly, this article does not provide a definition of the term “AI” but rather explores various ways in which the idea of AI has been used to organize how people understand our world, allocate resources, and relate to each other."
>>
@emilymbender My view is that that *is* the definition of "AI": that which is used to deceive the public (esp. investors/financial class) into believing the machine is capable of doing human-like or far-fetched things it's not.
