Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying

It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful.

This is stupid. The tools are helpful. Overhyped? Sure. But to pretend they are in no way helpful is just wrong.

Part of the problem is AI isn’t a literal thing with a fixed definition. It’s more of a marketing term that translates into “I want you to buy this thing”. So some things are considered AI that are legitimately useful and others are not and then there’s the debate if wether it’s because it really is AI or if it is and AI just sucks.

In other words, corporate leadership is starting from the premise that AI has (or will) radically change the business, and they’re working backwards from that premise to find the evidence to support this article of faith.

This quote is quite funny in this context, because it’s literally what people do with AI. Half of the frontpage of lemmy is AI. The other half is people saying AI is bad with no realization of the irony, because they don’t see good AI. It’s like CGI. Everybody hates CGI, except they don’t. CGI is everywhere. They just hate bad CGI.

What is AI? Explain as if i just woke up from a coma. We don’t have flying cars, we have dumpster deloreans, but everyone is talking about AI. What is it?

AI is a vague term used colloquially to describe a variety of dissimilar and unrelated technologies each carrying a unique mixture of pros and cons.

So it doesn’t actually mean anything.

Like most things, meaning depends on context. In the most common context of “news about AI” we’re talking about generative AI: image/video generators, LLMs, and to a lesser degree coding assistants. If you want to know more about what these technologies share in common, look up what a “perceptron” is and how it works.

More generally AI could mean anything from a neural network based approach to problem solving, to a completely deterministic, hand coded heuristic. A pure decision tree could be AI in the case of video game NPCs, for example.

So it’s a new synonym for algorithm.