[YoukaiCountry]

If you could show people 20 years ago what we have now, I have no doubt most people would have considered it AI. We can have actual conversations with our computers, they can now interact with tools they are provided, and act in a reasonably intelligent manner for a great many tasks. 20-year-ago-me would have barely been able to believe it. Is this sort of stance that this "isn't AI" missing the forest for the trees?

[mooreds]

> We can have actual conversations with our computers,

Not just computers, but documents! It's amazing to be able to paste in a few RFCs and then interrogate the documents to get a better understanding of them.

It is truly an amazing time we live in. I get the worries and fear too, but it is still amazing.

[Awoooooo]

Dude we were having "actual conversations with our computers" ten years ago and weren't pretending it was AI because it fucking wasn't then, it was markov chains, oh and it's ADVANCED markov chains now.

Delusion.

[yallpendantools]

I think it's not so much the technical scope that makes it "not the AI you read of as a child" but the societal impact. AI/robots/automation was supposed to usher in some kind of techno-utopia for all the good and bad that it entails. Cue the quote about AI supposedly about taking over the boring tasks so we can spend more time making art, achieving self-actualization.

The AI you read of as a child (speaking for myself, coming from a lot of 80s sci-fi stories) is not all good of course; that's where most of the plot's conflict comes from. But LLMs, for a lot of people, are more burdened with the downsides sci-fi stories warned us about with very little, if any, of the advantages.

And speaking of forests for the trees, you zoom out a bit more and see that this AI hype train is following a years-long trend of SV being exposed for its moral failings. We have repeatedly shown, as an industry, that we missed the point of the literature we so love to quote. From the concept of "meritocracy" to naming a company "Palantir". The AI hype is not an isolated incident. We love to quote Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park but it's all rhetoric---we don't really ask ourselves that question!

[xg15]

Maybe also whether AI is a "person" or not? A prominent theme of AI in fiction was discussion whether an AI can have a consciousness, can be considered to be an individual, etc - with author and reader usually being on the "yes, they are a person" side.

Even if not, interesting AIs were at least interesting characters in a story sense (e.g. C3P0).

Now we're dealing with effectively the opposite - something that looks and behaves like a person but is decidedly not one. If you grew up with all the scifi about sympathetic (or at least charismatic) AI characters, this is probably sobering.

[phil21]

> AI/robots/automation was supposed to usher in some kind of techno-utopia for all the good and bad that it entails.

Depends on which sci-fi and/or literature you've been reading, I suppose?

Plenty written on these subjects where the future does not turn into some techno-utopia. And I've always found these takes on the subject much more compatible with the human condition as I've personally observed it in practice.

[JsonDemWitOster]

Wow. Palantirians (or whatever tf they call themselves) have no reply other than downvotes? Couldn't even get ChatGPT to astroturf an advocacy?

[Barrin92]

>We can have actual conversations with our computers

conversational interfaces we've had for decades. In fact this goes so far back that people thought ELIZA was sentient (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect), and not just laypersons but even the people working on it.

The actual lesson from this stuff is that linguistic interfaces fry people's brains, you could convince nerds that a brick was intelligent if you hooked it up to the voice of Scarlett Johansson. The perception that these systems are in any meaningful way intelligent, when they start getting stuck in a doom loop of fixing the same two bugs by reintroducing them in circles or give entire reviews for a music album that doesn't actually exist, is entirely in the head of the user.

[queenkjuul]

What's nuts to me is how sycophantic the models are even when I'm just generating code. "What a fantastic project!" "Such an elegant solution!" When all I've done is described the problem and pasted a debug trace or whatever.

It's annoying in my context but it's no wonder people jumping into open ended "conversations" with these things and up in dangerous feedback loops