Inspired by a recent talk from Richard Stallman.
From Slashdot:
Speaking about AI, Stallman warned that “nowadays, people often use the term artificial intelligence for things that aren’t intelligent at all…” He makes a point of calling large language models “generators” because “They generate text and they don’t understand really what that text means.” (And they also make mistakes “without batting a virtual eyelash. So you can’t trust anything that they generate.”) Stallman says “Every time you call them AI, you are endorsing the claim that they are intelligent and they’re not. So let’s let’s refuse to do that.”
Sometimes I think that even though we are in a “FuckAI” community, we’re still helping the “AI” companies by tacitly agreeing that their LLMs and image generators are in fact “AI” when they’re not. It’s similar to how the people saying “AI will destroy humanity” give an outsized aura to LLMs that they don’t deserve.
Personally I like the term “generators” and will make an effort to use it, but I’m curious to hear everyone else’s thoughts.
It’s the word we use for that technology. A “meme” in today’s sense has little to nothing to do with “memes” in the early internet sense and certainly the original concept as defined by Dawkins and I could cry and yell about that injustice all day long or I could use words that other people understand if I want to convey anything.
Once they are interested in what you have to say, because they were curious about “why would anyone be anti-AI?”, you can then very easily educate them as to more precise terminology. You won’t get even to that point if they’re thinking “anti-large-language-model-generated slop? never heard of that before, don’t care.”