No one sells the pale shadow of a future announced almost like a prophecy better than the technology industry. According to its supporters and participants in the form of technology companies, we will all live in the “metaverse”, build our financial infrastructure on “web3” and endow our lives with “artificial intelligence”. These three terms are mirages that have helped their lobbyists rack up billions of dollars despite the fact that reality candidly reveals their scams. Bloomberg reporter Parmy Olson exposes the scammers.
Artificial intelligence, in particular, evokes the notion of thinking machines. But no machine can think, and no program can be truly intelligent. But the industry example shows that this phrase alone can be one of the most successful marketing terms of all time.
In fact, GPT-4 (the basis for the popular ChatGPT) and other great language models like it simply produce a text database of about a trillion words. With an army of people programming it through patching and editing, patterns combine words based on probability.
Obviously it’s not even close to intelligence
Olson writes with caustic irony.
Considered and similar systems are trained to generate texts that look believable, but they are positioned by the IT company as new oracles of knowledge that can be connected to search engines. It’s reckless to trust GPT-4, which keeps making mistakes. Just a few weeks ago, Microsoft Corp. and Google Alphabet Inc. have suffered from revelations that search engines have specific facts wrong.
Terms such as “neural networks” and “deep learning” are misleading and only reinforce the idea that these programs are like humans. Neural networks are in no way replicas of the human brain.
Society urgently needs a different lexicon that does not promote false, pseudo-scientific magic ideas about computer systems or absolve the people who develop these systems on a global scale. They are the ones who can be the attackers, not some mythical AI or some kind of intelligence locked in an electrical circuit.
Unfortunately, many people misuse or even flaunt AI terms in order to get people to start buying technology or start listening. But, in fact, all this AI is just a recombination of images already created by people. And no more, concluded the journalist.
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