The newest trend here the blogosphere is ChatGPT….it is being employed by many as a tool for posts and comments and that raises the question how intelligent is AI?

Data is the answer and it takes lots of work to make it so…..

Of all the stories about artificial intelligence that have emerged of late, a new one from Josh Dzieza in a collaboration for New York and the Verge is equal parts compelling and surprising. He explores a simple-sounding premise: In order for AI models to work, they need to be fed data—lots of data, almost unimaginable amounts of data. Enter the “annotators.” Meaning, millions of people around the world working for generally low pay toiling away at monotonous tasks such as labeling photos of clothes, all so the AI models get ever smarter. Behind “even the most impressive AI system are people—huge numbers of people labeling data to train it and clarifying data when it gets confused,” writes Dzieza.
In what he calls a rising “global industry,” they work for companies that sell this data to big players for a steep price, all of which fosters a culture of secrecy.

Annotators, in fact, are usually forbidden from talking about their work, though they typically are kept in the dark about the big picture anyway. (One big player is Scale AI, a data vendor in Silicon Valley.) “The result is that, with few exceptions, little is known about the information shaping these systems’ behavior, and even less is known about the people doing the shaping.” Dzieza interviewed two dozen annotators around the world, and he even worked as one himself to get the full picture. At one point in describing the entire human-machine feedback loop, he offers this mind-bending gem: “ChatGPT seems so human because it was trained by an AI that was mimicking humans who were rating an AI that was mimicking humans who were pretending to be a better version of an AI that was trained on human writing.”

The full story is well worth a read.

So again….just how intelligent is AI?

A good question that could have many answers and this is one of them.

If one looks, for example, at a rather common concept of what intelligence is – the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, and the ability to perceive or infer information – AI doesn’t seem to do all that well.

Worse, for AI, intelligence can also be seen as the ability to retain newly learned information – not misinformation and disinformation and not made up stuff generated by ChatGPT.

Intelligence is knowledge applied towards adaptive behaviors within an environment or context. From the standpoint of what intelligence actually is, AI seems to be miles away from actually being intelligent.

Given our understanding of intelligence, the allegedly so intelligent AI even failed to find a simple picture of me and to create a reasonably close approximation of me. Worse, the much famed ChatGPT – in another self-test – got four facts wrong about me. Rather than being intelligent, AI seems to just make stuff up.

Yet, despite this, the apostles of AI – including media capitalism – have a very serious incentive to diminish AI’s – known! – limitations. Hyped up by the media, AI has become big business in recent months.

Even thorough corporate media – and this is quite apart from ChatGPT failing the Turing-test and from other rather incapable AI image creation websites, AI is set to become increasingly dominant in our global online, and not so online, culture. To arrive where it is today, AI had to travel a long way.

While the term “artificial intelligence” may had been first used in 1894, the term “artificial intelligence” was turbo-charged in 1956. Today, AI continues to be popularized and most recently sensationalized. In reality, AI has no human-like intelligence. Its limited machine intelligence is radically different from what we know intelligence to be.

The prevailing myth of AI tells us that AI can – or will in the future – do almost everything. Yet, AI’s incredible success rests on narrow applications like board games It can also predict the next set of sleepwear purchased on Amazon. However, all this gets us not one step closer to general intelligence – an AI system that can do more than play games and sell things.

How Intelligent is Artificial Intelligence?

I have been told to embrace this technology for it is the way of the future….to that I say bunk.

That was the same crap I was told about the George Forman grill that I should use it instead of my charcoal grill….I will use what works for me.

And now your thoughts.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”