The Honest Courtesan

As I have repeatedly said and will continue to say, there is no such thing as “artificial intelligence”  regardless of what tech billionaires and their marketing departments tell you.  I’m neither splitting hairs nor being pedantic; the main reason so-called “AI” is becoming so problematic is that far too many ignorant people truly believe there is a kind of “intelligence”, even if it’s an artificial one, behind these electronic Mad Libs.  People who interact with these systems think they’re interacting with an ancestor of Commander Data or C3PO, when in actuality they’re merely accessing a program that’s roughly as aware of their existence as the software that runs modern slot machines is, often with similar psychological results.  The reason so-called “AI” spouts out such dangerous gibberish is that it is incapable of telling truth from falsehood, precisely because it is not “intelligent” in any way.  It does not understand the relationship between the words it is programmed to parse and the real world; in fact, it doesn’t even know that the real world exists.  These programs are glorified sorting algorithms; they have much more in common with a Rolodex than with any kind of intelligence, even fish-level intelligence.  So the reason they “lie” and invent nonsense is that words are not representative of facts to them; they’re just collections of characters to be manipulated by algorithms.  But the most dangerous falsehoods are not those invented by these algorithms; it’s the one told by people who do have actual intelligence that the behavior of these programs constitutes anything which even remotely approaches that quality, which (at least for the present) is a function reserved only for living brains.