AI is hot! AI is the new black! AI is the future!
And AI stands for Artificial Intelligence. Which is basically an intelligence demonstrated by machines as opposed to non-human animals and human intelligence.
As many of us you ask, you will get a lot of different answers in what we consider to be AI. When we get down to examples, specific examples, again, our opinions are going to be different. Because the term is so vague that it actually includes so many technologies, so many examples, so many applications.
Now, although the term is vague and can include a lot of ideas and examples, there are specific techniques used to achieve the learning capability of a machine. This is to say, the machine learns from examples and extrapolates similar to human and non-human animals behavior.
Not everything done in an automated manner by a machine using a software is actually what we think of as AI. As in the glamourous robots which travel through time and come ready to take over my workload and my responsibilities and basically live my life better than I would. Isn’t this what you think of when you say AI? Or a variation of this, at least.
But since AI is so hot right now, company after company advertises their products as AI based. And that is not simply not fair. It is like selling the same product once advertised as bio and once as non-bio. Or organic and less organic. Or created using recycled materials. But for these we have organizations and legislation to protect the customers and the differentiation is documented well enough.
When it comes to AI, we all sell AI – the coffee makers you program to make the coffee at 6 AM and stop when it finished the coffee, to your fridge making ice or alerting you’re out of milk to your software service provider, we all sell AI. The same products as before AI became such a hot topic but now they are AI based.
And it is difficult to disprove those claims at times, even for us working in the industry. I would have to either test the product until I can find proof that it is not learning based on some examples – which takes a lot of time or just look ‘under the hood’ which is not often allowed by most companies.
Luckily, various governments already started to take AI claims seriously as well and create rules and regulations to minimize fraud.
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2023/02/keep-your-ai-claims-check
Photo by Felipe Simo on Unsplash