Maya on Nostr: It's like if I called the Fischer–Tropsch process alchemy instead of chemistry. ...

It's like if I called the Fischer–Tropsch process alchemy instead of chemistry.

Alchemy was a technical term back in the 16th century, but there is a reason why we use chemistry today.

Sure you can do it, but it's going to drive chemists and chemical engineers up the wall.

Now, like alchemy has the quests of turning lead into gold, and creating the philosopher's stone, artificial intelligence is the quest to create an artificial mind.

In the late 90s/early 2000s, SV tech utopians resurrected AI as a holy grail they could sell to credulous VCs, and we've suffered the consequences since.

There is a reason that the ancient joke "If it works, it ain't AI" exists (and it was decades old by the time I was a grad student), and why my "AI" coursework was called machine learning, computer vision, and robotics, and why "generative models" as a term existed but not "generative AI". See N-grams how it's a term that only begins to come into use in the 2010s: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=generative+AI%2Cgenerative+models&year_start=1958&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=true