AI for Dummies

 

     There is a lot of confusion over the AI phenomenon—especially the terminology used in discussing it. We need a glossary. I am happy to provide one.

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     AI: An acronym for “artificial intelligence”, an intentionally misleading oxymoron. The opposite of “natural ignorance” (NI).

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     AGI: “Artificial general intelligence”, a common theme in science fiction, describing an autonomous non-human agent that surpasses normal human capabilities. The opposite of “husband”.

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     Open AI: A nonprofit firm established (2015) by 12 geniuses for the purpose of developing a “safe and beneficial” AGI, promising free access to its use and transparency in its operation. The exact meanings of “safe”, “beneficial”, and “transparency” are still being worked out.

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     LLM: “Large language model”, a computer model of human language recognition and generation. The model uses massive quantities of data from sources such as literature, medicine, and maybe the Sunday comics to train computers beyond what we humans know—or imagine that we know.

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     Chatbot: Short for “Chatty robot”, an interactive computer program using an LLM to simulate human conversation while trying not to be either obnoxious or boring. Alexa is a chatbot. Occasionally obnoxious.

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     ChatGPT: Meaning “Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer”, a greatly advanced chatbot created by OpenAI which seeks to answer all questions and solve all problems using congenial human-language text, often making congenial human mistakes. Use it to write your term paper or legal brief. Then get expelled. Or sued.

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     DALL-E: An image generator using text prompts (the visual version of ChatGPT), trained on 400 million images with text captions, all harvested from the internet. It is an acronym for “Dali” (the surrealist) and “Eve” (from the Pixar animation “WALL-E”). It is a good way to create “deepfakes”: falsified photos and videos intended to confound those of us who believe that a picture is worth a thousand words.

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     Perhaps this terminology is intended to be concealing, but maybe it’s just my cynicism. I fantasize that AI has named itself "lord" and the techies are its minions, and in our mutual defense, I’m sending out this glossary. Save yourselves!

 

Ron Wetherington