this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2025
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I'd like to think that words have meaning. They should not be used to pump up stock prices. And certain words, like intelligence, deserve respect.
Words have meaning, and the meaning of those words change throughout time, cultures, and even niche circles. In a perfect world, we'd all explain the definition of a word that we are using, but we don't, and we rely on public consensus to determine the meaning of words. People are able to accept this for slang, but for some reason have a hard time accepting that it happens for normal words as well. People have been using AI to mean "any semblance of thought" in tech for a long time. When playing a game against a computer, people have been calling the computer player AI, even back when games were rudimentary.
Of course, I'm as big a hater of AI by the modern definition as anyone, I just think there are a lot of people dying on the hill of "words can't change" when it's a pretty crazy position to hold.
Excuse me if I don't want to let corporations redefine my language.
I think there can be AI, but this is not it. It's one of the reasons I don't want to call generative or predictive models AI.
I guess what I'm saying is that the colloquial definition of "AI" hasn't changed with the rise of LLMs. "AI" has been used to mean "computers that can make decisions" for at least 20 years. I don't know if you play video games, but "AI" has been synonymous with "Bot" or "NPC" in that space for a long time now.
When I was in college, I took classes on Artificial Neural Networks, a good several years before LLMs were released to the public. While you wouldn't find it in a textbook, a lot of the students called ANNs "AI".
Hell, the term "Artificial General Intelligence" was coined in 2007 to replace "AI" for the definition you are using, since people had started using "AI" a lot looser. That was 18 years ago, long before LLMs.
I agree that the corporations calling their LLMs AI is misleading and manipulative, hell I even could agree that they shouldn't be allowed to, but let's not pretend that they have changed the definition of AI. That is fundamentally untrue.
All good points man.