Dr. Richard M. Stallman (RMS) Asks People to Stop Calling Large Language Models (LLMs) "Artificial Intelligence" (AI)
From the talk he gave last month: (the Q&A section/session)
[Question read out loud] What would you say to people who think AI is sentient and equal to us?RMS: Well, the real AI systems that I've heard about operate in very narrow domains. A program that can look at an image of some cells and report whether it's cancerous at least as accurately as a human pathologist, that can be very useful. But it's in now way comparable to the mental breadth of a human mind. And no one would ever think it was. I suspect that the person who wrote this question was thinking of bullshit generators. And there, well there are a lot of things I can say to them. I saw a wonderful lecture by professor Zittrain of Harvard showing just how little bullshit generators actually understand of what they output and I think it got the message across very clearly. But I don't know whether he's published that. But I think that the first step is stop calling them AI. That's why I put so much emphasis on what we should call them. After all, what we call them doesn't change what they are. If you call it a bullshit generator or you call it AI it will still be the same system, whichever one it happens to be it'll still be the same. Whichever system you're talking about, it'll still be the same whether you call it AI or a bullshit generator but what people expect from it will be different.
The practice of calling these things intelligence and repeating this many times a day to people leads most people unthinkingly to assume that that's true. That's why it makes a difference which one we call them. That's why it's not enough to say yeah they call them AI but it's not true and then go on calling them AI. If we want to change the direction of the public of what to think, we have to be heard on this whenever people talk with us about this things and call it AI. We've got to be there and say, that's a misnomer they are not anything like what we think.