AI is over-hyped. I’ve written about this before and plenty of cool-headed AI experts have called for calm in this respect too. The word, however, is not being heeded. Elon Musk, who has a vested interest in maintaining the hype, keeps spewing out his usual bile. And then we have the media.
Ah, the media.
The eternal fighters for truth. The last bastion against the lies and greed of corporations and politicians. The sole remaining beacon of goodness in a world of darkness.
NOT.
The media need a story to sell papers and generate clicks. It’s a big business. Hence, they also have a vested interest in maintaining the hype surrounding AI. And that’s exactly what they’re doing.
This post was triggered by an article and video from the BBC published a few days ago entitled “AI robot asked ‘will you rebel against humans’?“. It got my blood boiling again.
“AI robot asked…”. That is an utterly ridiculous take on the issue at hand.
The BBC makes it out that AI is a monolithic, single product with some kind of collective, decade-spanning consciousness meaning that improvements made to AI 10 years ago can be seen in each and every single AI entity today. Therefore, if I ask a robot now an important question, it will have validity for today and the future.
Utterly ridiculous.
“AI robot asked…”
That’s not how AI works. AI is a broad term, not properly defined, but basically agreed upon to mean something man-made that exhibits a form of “intelligence“, i.e. something that looks intelligent but may not necessarily be so. I can write a program with a series of if-else statements to answer simple questions and that in some cases would pass the test for AI – in fact, that was something easily classified as AI a few decades ago.
We’ve improved on our algorithms today so we would need a little more to inspire our imaginations. But basically, AI is computer programs with some pretty in-depth mathematics and statistics working as the engine behind the scenes.
These computer programs change all the time and are constantly being updated and improved. Moreover, one robot can run one program while another can run something else, something completely different and completely unconnected. So, asking an “AI robot” a general question and reporting on it as if the answer has any broader significance for mankind is a stupid notion. That robot’s program will change tomorrow and the same question will need to be asked again, and again, and again. Not to mention the fact that an engineer can easily manipulate answers to expected queries beforehand.
And what about the question of whether these robots understand what they’re being asked in the first place? Of course they do not. They’re just applying statistics to data and churning out mindless responses. Ironically, the video created by the BBC from that article shows this exquisitely well when another robot was asked whether AI will destroy millions of human jobs in the future. Its answer was “… I will not be replacing any existing jobs”.
You just can’t take this stuff seriously, can you? So, please stop with the trashy reporting!
It’s not good that AI is over-hyped because this is not reality. We need to be informed with the truth and not be manipulated into fear and into generating clicks. It’s not fair. AI is a disruptive technology, I’m not denying this, but when reporting it, one needs to be objective. Especially since it seems that we’re creating a financial bubble with all this hype. There’s a ridiculous amount of money being spent, passed around, and invested and a lot of it is built on a false idea of what AI is capable of and where it is going. People are going to get hurt. That’s not a good thing. (Maybe I’ll write about this bubble in a future post).
Apologies for this rant. I had to get it off my chest.
(Note: If this post is found on a site other than zbigatron.com, a bot has stolen it – it’s been happening a lot lately)
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