• erwan@lemmy.ml
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    6 months ago

    OK, generative AI isn’t machine learning.

    But to get back to what AI is, the definition has been moving forever as AI becomes “just software” when it becomes ubiquitous. People were shocked that machines could calculate, then that they can play chess better than humans, then that they can read handwriting…

    The first mistake have been to invent the term to start with, as it implies thinking machine but they’re not.

    Or as Dijkstra puts it: “asking whether a machine can think is as dumb as asking if a submarine can swim”.

    • blurg@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Or as Dijkstra puts it: “asking whether a machine can think is as dumb as asking if a submarine can swim”.

      Alan Turing puts it similarly, the question is nonsense. However, if you define “machine” and “thinking”, and redefine the question to mean: is machine thinking differentiable from human thinking; you can answer affirmatively, theoretically (rough paraphrasing). Though the current evidence suggests otherwise (e.g. AI learning from other AI drifts toward nonsense).

      For more, see: Computing Machinery and Intelligence, and Turing’s original paper (which goes into the Imitation Game).