Comment by pingou
5 days ago
Ok so the hype would be people saying AI can currently do something well and autonomously when it cannot (or not consistently enough), and it is easy to prove them wrong.
But I feel like people are more hyped about what the AI will be able to do soon rather than what it can do now.
I think AI does understand things (depending on your definition), how else could we communicate and ask it a question if it didn't? I mean we're quite far from Eliza here.
And yes, often their answer would be so wrong that we think it is impossible that AI understands anything, but this jagged intelligence doesn't prove, at least to me, that there isn't some understanding. At what point do we say that AI understands things? What if we can reduce 99% of those dumb failures, would we then say than AI understands?
>I think AI does understand things (depending on your definition), how else could we communicate and ask it a question if it didn't?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
That doesn't really respond to the question though - there is a quite reasonable argument that the Chinese room as a system 'understands' things.
The issue that is hit immediately is we don't have a definition or test of understanding that AI doesn't clear easily. Then on top of that we can't even really be sure that we ourselves are understand things given all the tricks that our minds play with memory and perception. There is precious little evidence that the people around us understand things, they seem to be guessing. It is completely unclear if a Chinese room has or doesn't have a property if we rule out all the tests that check for it as not really counting. But all the tests we can do suggest it does understand, because engineers can implement Chinese rooms now and they even turn out to be more reliably artistic/capable of novel thinking/creative than humans. Anything that tests understanding they can do.
> and it is easy to prove them wrong
No, they just say you are using the wrong model or something.
If it's a coworker dumping reviews of crap code on you at work, the incentive is to blanket approve everything because otherwise you're just the grumpy old man who is resisting innovation. No matter that the code makes no sense at all and the tests aren't actually testing what they should test.