jwzFeb 20, 2023

The best description I've ever heard of AI is the following. I heard this in the 80s, and it has held up since:

AI is magic.

1: You see a magic trick. You are amazed by the magic.

2: You are shown how the trick works. You are impressed by the technique.

3: You learn how to perform the trick. Now it's not magic, it's sleight-of-hand, or mirrors, or misdirection.

This is why "AI" is always bullshit: once you understand it, it's not AI any more, it's something else.

Show threadFiXato
@jwz maybe we should redefine the acronym as Assistive Interaction. For instance looking at #MidJourney, I see it as an interactive assistant that helps me warm up my imagination; rendered prompts can give me new insights into how I could interpret a scene, or give references for objects I want to include in a scene.
And what I've seen so far of #ChatGPT powered #Bing Search, it could be a useful assistant to further guide my searches and narrow down results. Not to spoonfeed me the answers, but to suggest a plausible path to get there. One example would be a search they did on Linus Tech Tips' #WANShow, where they asked it how many of their backpacks would fit in the trunk of a Tesla car. Bing then did related searches for the dimensions of the backpack and the trunk, as well as tries to find references to similar products to show how many of those would fit in there.
It also however indicated that a trunk generally has oddly shaped corners and such, and that the actual volume thus might be smaller.
It included its math IIRC, which could thus be verified.
Having an overview included of all the searches, and the pages it used as reference, is a big difference for me from what I've seen of regular ChatGPT results, as it allows you to easily verify the data.
Feb 20, 2023 at 10:20amWeb