Comment on YSK that "AI" in itself is highly unspecific term

• Perspectivist@feddit.uk ⁨5⁩ ⁨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.

  source

  • ArgumentativeMonotheist@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨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…

    source

    • SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨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?

      source
• BB84@mander.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Do most humans understand what molecules are? How?

  source