Inspired by a recent talk from Richard Stallman.
From Slashdot:
Speaking about AI, Stallman warned that “nowadays, people often use the term artificial intelligence for things that aren’t intelligent at all…” He makes a point of calling large language models “generators” because “They generate text and they don’t understand really what that text means.” (And they also make mistakes “without batting a virtual eyelash. So you can’t trust anything that they generate.”) Stallman says “Every time you call them AI, you are endorsing the claim that they are intelligent and they’re not. So let’s let’s refuse to do that.”
Sometimes I think that even though we are in a “FuckAI” community, we’re still helping the “AI” companies by tacitly agreeing that their LLMs and image generators are in fact “AI” when they’re not. It’s similar to how the people saying “AI will destroy humanity” give an outsized aura to LLMs that they don’t deserve.
Personally I like the term “generators” and will make an effort to use it, but I’m curious to hear everyone else’s thoughts.
It is not a lie but a widely accepted and agreed on definition that precedes LLMs by years, and had been created by people way smarter then you and I combined, and who have spent more time in AI research than most people here.
An LLM is an ANI (artificial narrow intelligence), and any ANI is an AI, the broader term for any artificial intelligence. An ANI operates not on intelligence as a human intelligence, its intelligence is a set of rules. A search engine algorithm is a set of rules. Your phone’s keyboard is a set of rules. T9 typing on your old Nokia is a set of rules and can be classified as an ANI. An LLM has rules how it spits out the next token.
There is no universal definition of AI, because we would need to have a universal definition of human intelligence for that first. Since there is no single universal definition, it’s free for you to disagree on that definition. But calling it disinformation, that no computer program is intelligent, or a lie is simply wrong.