Comment on YSK that "AI" in itself is highly unspecific term
Perspectivist@feddit.uk 2 days ago“Understanding requires awareness” isn’t some settled fact - it’s just something you’ve asserted. There’s plenty of debate around what understanding even is, especially in AI, and awareness or consciousness is not a prerequisite in most definitions. Systems can model, translate, infer, and apply concepts without being “aware” of anything - just like humans often do things without conscious thought.
You don’t need to be self-aware to understand that a sentence is grammatically incorrect or that one molecule binds better than another. It’s fine to critique the hype around AI - a lot of it is overblown - but slipping in homemade definitions like that just muddies the waters.
ArgumentativeMonotheist@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Do you think “AI” KNOWS/UNDERSTANDS what a grammatically incorrect sentence is or what molecules even are? How?
Perspectivist@feddit.uk 2 days ago
You’re moving the goalposts. First you claimed understanding requires awareness, now you’re asking whether an AI knows what a molecule is - as if that’s even the standard for functional intelligence.
No, AI doesn’t “know” things the way a human does. But it can still reliably identify ungrammatical sentences or predict molecular interactions based on training data. If your definition of “understanding” requires some kind of inner experience or conscious grasp of meaning, then fine. But that’s a philosophical stance, not a technical one.
The point is: you don’t need subjective awareness to model relationships in data and produce useful results. That’s what modern AI does, and that’s enough to call it intelligent in the functional sense - whether or not it “knows” anything in the way you’d like it to.
ArgumentativeMonotheist@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Intelligence, as the word has always been used, requires awareness and understanding, not just spitting out data after input, as dynamic and complex the process might be, through a set of rules. AI, as you just described it, does nothing necessarily different from other computational tools: they speed up processes that can be calculated/algorithmically structured. I don’t see how that particularly makes “AI” deserving of the adjective ‘intelligent’, it seems more of a marketing term the same way ‘smartphones’ were. The disagreement we’re having here is semantic…
SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
The funny thing is, is that the goalposts on what is/isn’t intelligent has always shifted in the AI world
Being good at chess used to be a symbol of high intelligence. Now? Computer software can beat the best chess players in a fraction of the time used to think, 100% of the time, and we call that just an algorithm
This is not how intelligence has always been used. Moreover, we don’t even have a full understand of what intelligence is
And as a final note, human brains are also computational “tools”. As far as we can tell, there’s nothing fundamentally different between a brain and a theoretical Turing machine
And in a way, isn’t what we “spit” out also data? Specifically data in the form of nerve output and all the internal processing that accompanies it?
BB84@mander.xyz 2 days ago
Do most humans understand what molecules are? How?