
AI can now emulate human behaviors – soon it will be dangerously good - myinnerbanjo
https://theconversation.com/artificial-intelligence-can-now-emulate-human-behaviors-soon-it-will-be-dangerously-good-114136
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cirgue
The term AI seriously muddies the waters of this conversation. None of these
technologies have the slightest whiff of independent agency, autonomy, or the
ability to learn/adapt without the considerable talent and prodigious effort
of people or teams of people. No one thinks that Photoshop's more
sophisticated tools are AI, but effectively these tools are Photoshop for
video and audio. These are sophisticated tools to be sure, but ultimately the
problem has nothing to do with AI: They're fundamentally problems with
malicious human actors exploiting the broken epistemology of the internet,
which has been happening for decades. AI _is_ , however, a great way to get
clicks/pageviews for non-insights.

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tabtab
Terms are ultimately defined by users of them, not some official or scientific
body, for good or bad. I recommend people stop complaining about usage of the
term.

If somebody comes up with a clear distinction between "strong" AI and "weak"
AI, then we can complain about "correct" usage with some wind at our back.
Until then, the vocabulary issue is not worth focusing on.

I suspect AI progress will be incremental such that there will be no definite
distinction, only shades of whatever traits we use to define it. It will be
more like a child slowly growing up rather than C3PO just walking out the lab
door one of these days.

The current crop of well-known AI uses mostly statistical pattern matching,
and thus lacks "common sense" as we typically think of it. But eventually the
pattern matching will be integrated into things like the CYC database of
common-sense facts and start to show more common sense. However, it will
probably make silly mistakes for a good while.

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tabtab
People stopped trusting photos when Photoshop (and clones) became commonplace.
They will likewise stop trusting videos when enough known fakes are floating
around.

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dragonwriter
> People stopped trusting photos when Photoshop (and clones) became
> commonplace.

People stopped trusting photos that challenge preconceived bias then, but they
still trust them when they reinforce such biases.

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tabtab
That's going to happen regardless, and people have been doing that with
written works since the first writing appeared.

However, the technique used to rely more on supernatural than "fake logic". It
was more like, "Deity X says you are bad, and thus must be smitten." But
replace Deity X with Hannity or Bill Maher and you get mostly the same thing.

