this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

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    • If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
    • A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
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Any tool can be a hammer if you use it wrong enough.

A good hammer is designed to be a hammer and only used like a hammer.

If you have a fancy new hammer, everything looks like a nail.

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[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago

Sometimes it is more like "AI is like a hammer in a world full of screws."

[–] Flax_vert@feddit.uk 14 points 10 months ago

It's not good at replacing your job, but good at convincing your boss that it can

[–] kibiz0r@midwest.social 19 points 10 months ago

It's more like Jefferson's dumbwaiter, in that it was created by someone who verbally supported an egalitarian utopian vision of society, but the device itself is a scale model of an exploitative social system. At one station of the device, unpaid/low-paid labor operates out of view of the user, and then at the other station, the user enjoys an almost-magical appearance of an answer to their request.

No tool is "just a tool", after all. In that way, AI is like a hammer.

(That section of the video leans heavily on Do Artifacts Have Politics?, which is a pretty short and accessible essay. If you're not convinced that artifacts do have politics, and you don't want to watch the video, just read a few paragraphs of the essay.)

[–] Dagwood222@lemm.ee 14 points 10 months ago

Nope. It's more like that weird thing you brought at 3 am off of the Home Shopping Network because you were in a really bad place and thought it would make you feel better.

Now it's taking up space and you don't want to throw it out because that would mean you're a failure...

[–] DmMacniel@feddit.org 1 points 10 months ago (4 children)

calling (mm)LLMs AI is just corpo bullshit. But hey, it's fancy, right?

[–] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I don't see the "is not actual AI" argument.

Since the 80 AI has just been algorithms and proposals for neural networks.

It never has need to have a "soul" or "be sentient" to be Artificial Intelligence.

Even a simple Tic Tac Toc opponent algorithm has been called AI without much complaining about it.

Also AI didn't got called AI by corporations. That naming for the technology dates from where it was being proposed as concepts in universities.

[–] aaaa@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Complaining that it's called AI is like complaining that smartphones are called smart. There's no stopping it, you just end up sounding like an old man yelling at the cloud. (Which isn't really a cloud, but we still call it that)

[–] DmMacniel@feddit.org 0 points 10 months ago

Nah, smartphones being actually "smarter" than feature phones as in you can do way more than just basic stuff like calling, messaging people, run a simple calculation, having a calendar etc.

[–] lmaydev@lemmy.world 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

They are neural networks which are some of the oldest AI tech we have.

You can hate them, but they are by definition AI.

[–] DmMacniel@feddit.org -4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

uhm no, AI is relaying on neural networks (which are just weighted gates) but Neural Networks are not by definition AI.

[–] lmaydev@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I'm sorry but they absolutely are.

[–] DmMacniel@feddit.org -2 points 10 months ago

sorry, but I disagree.

[–] 0laura@lemmy.world 11 points 10 months ago (4 children)

you not liking it doesn't make it any less ai. I don't remember that many people complaining when we called the code controlling video game characters ai.

[–] DmMacniel@feddit.org 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

pretty sure that they were and still are called Bots though, atleast in the context of first person shooter.

[–] 0laura@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

look at the NBT tags for bats for example. it means artificial intelligence.

https://www.digminecraft.com/data_tags/bat.php

[–] DmMacniel@feddit.org 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

next thing you gonna say that boids are AI too...

just because Mojang decided to name that flag noAI doesn't mean it uses AI to govern its behavior.

[–] 0laura@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

Descriptivism advocates when AI smhingmyheads

[–] kescusay@lemmy.world -2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

Software developer, here.

It's not actually AI. A large language model is essentially autocomplete on steroids. Very useful in some contexts, but it doesn't "learn" the way a neural network can. When you're feeding corrections into, say, ChatGPT, you're making small, temporary, cached adjustments to its data model, but you're not actually teaching it anything, because by its nature, it can't learn.

I'm not trying to diss LLMs, by the way. Like I said, they can be very useful in some contexts. I use Copilot to assist with coding, for example. Don't want to write a bunch of boilerplate code? Copilot is excellent for speeding that process up.

[–] Zos_Kia@lemmynsfw.com 0 points 10 months ago

Very useful in some contexts, but it doesn’t “learn” the way a neural network can. When you’re feeding corrections into, say, ChatGPT, you’re making small, temporary, cached adjustments to its data model, but you’re not actually teaching it anything, because by its nature, it can’t learn.

But that's true of all (most ?) neural networks ? Are you saying Neural Networks are not AI and that they can't learn ?

NNs don't retrain while they are being used, they are trained once then they cannot learn new behaviour or correct existing behaviour. If you want to make them better you need to run them a bunch of times, collect and annotate good/bad runs, then re-train them from scratch (or fine-tune them) with this new data. Just like LLMs because LLMs are neural networks.

[–] 0laura@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

I know that they're "autocorrect on steroids" and what that means, I don't see how that makes it any less ai. I'm not saying that LLMs have that magic sauce that is needed to be considered truly "intelligent", I'm saying that ai doesn't need any magic sauce to be ai. the code controlling bats in Minecraft is called ai, and no one complained about that.

[–] celliern@lemmy.world 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

LLMs are part of AI, which is a fairly large research domain of math/info, including machine learning among other. God, even linear regression can be classified as AI : that term is reeeally large

[–] kescusay@lemmy.world -1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I mean, I guess the way people use the term "AI" these days, sure, but we're really beating all specificity out of the term.

[–] 0laura@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

it's always been this broad, and that's a good thing. if you want to talk about AGI then say AGI.

[–] celliern@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

This is a domain research domain that contain statistic methods and knowledge modeling among other. That's not new, but the fact that this is marketed like that everywhere is new

AI is really not a specific term. You may refer as global AI, and I suspect that's what you refer to when you say AI?

[–] Carighan@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Or called our mobile phones "cell phones", despite not being organic. Tsk.

[–] DmMacniel@feddit.org 1 points 10 months ago

Except cell phones or cellular phones refer to the structure a mobile network is built on: a mesh of cell towers.

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