"#AI" as Artificial Intelligence is not real.

Henrik Schönemann

"#AI" as Artificial Intelligence is not real. But the stuff being called "AI" most certainly is.
Simply telling people "AI is not real" is not helpful in the slightest. You're telling them: "Your perception of reality is wrong", but the machine does things that are 'indistinguishable from magic' (Hi Clarke!) to them.
We won't convince people by telling them "Your god isn't real! Follow me!" (I'm exaggerating), but by empowering them to emerge from their self-imposed immaturity.

Thanasis Kinias

@lavaeolus
so... how *do* we explain to laypeople that “AI” (which for most people now means ChatGPT and other LLMs) doesn’t do what the marketing says it does? (different, if subtly so, from “it’s not real”)

Henrik Schönemann

@tkinias by showing them - not telling, but showing.

Show them the limitations, the weirdness, the brokenness.

E.g.: Jacomy, Mathieu, and Erik Borra. 2024. “Measuring LLM Self-Consistency. Unknown Unknowns in Knowing Machines.” Sociologica 18 (2): 25–65. https://doi.org/10.6092/ISSN.1971-8853/19488.

Thanasis Kinias

@lavaeolus
I’m thinking more informally—like “talking to family over Xmas dinner” where I can’t assign them academic reading

What I often get when pointing out “the limitations, the weirdness, the brokenness” is that it’s early days and these problems will go away as the tech matures (a perspective, of course, predicated on a failure to understand the tech).

Henrik Schönemann

@tkinias Another very interesting article (no paper^^):
"There's a popular narrative right now that the people who aren't using AI – e.g. women – simply don't understand the technology. And once they do, they'll get on board. But Tanksley's research shows something else entirely: once Black students understand the technology – the racist and extractive logics that are fundamental to artificial intelligence – they are better prepared to resist and survive."
https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/the-robots-have-brain-rot/