Dr. Andy Farnell Blasts Misuse of the Term "AI" to Describe Plagiarism, Plunder, and Misinformation
"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."
Last night Dr. Andy Farnell published this article about how the term "AI" got distorted. I myself had done real AI and published some papers about it as far back as 20+ years ago (my Ph.D. thesis explained some later work on that). So did Andy (Dr. Farnell). Dr. Stallman wrote about it back in the early 1980s (46 years ago). I still developed with it as a postdoc not too long ago (pattern recognition by machine learning or ML).
"I had also done a bit with fuzzy logic though from a kind of applied perspective," an associate of ours said (many of us are Computer Scientists with relevant degrees, not faking it). "That was in the 1980s. I wonder what would have happened if I had gone into CS back then. ML was only theoretical back then. There was neither the RAM, the CPU, nor the data to do much with neural nets as they would require evolutionary programming to build. And, as we see with LLMs, even after all that, they do nothing useful. Fuzzy logic could work in practice and only slowed programs down a little."
Portions from Dr. Farnell's latest article:
The "AI" bubble will soon burst. That is a good thing. It's a necessary correction of a mass hysteria that's gripped the world for many years now.It was supposed to be useful. When I was an "AI" researcher in the 1990s one particular technique we used was Fuzzy Logic. We made simulated "neural" circuits like Perceptrons and Boltzmann Machines to combine lots of sensors. We made decisions based on the weighted contributions of many inputs and then we corrected or trained (back propagated errors) those weights until the system made the right choices more often.
We didn't call it "AI" then. To do so would have been pompous and pretentious. It was just "DSP" (Digital Signal Processing), or plain old "data processing".
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The fact is that the term has been hijacked. "AI" became a political phenomenon far beyond its scientific foundation, just as nuclear physics did in the 1940s and space travel did in the 1960s.
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I now mainly think of "AI" as fake people. It seems to nail what the word means right now. It's not just language models being used to replace human dialogue, but the wider lack of concern for correctness that surrounds "AI" woo.
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I'm still considering banning it on the show. Or rather, letting guests know that whenever someone says "AI" it will be replaced by a honky-horn clown sound, or a random word like "banana" or "hatstand" to emphasise absurdity.
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People like Sam Altman are not invested in "AI". They're invested in the the idea of "AI". That's a subtle but massively important distinction.
Go ahead and read Dr. Farnell's fine article. █