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Comment by rgbrenner | Hacker News Reader

AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. It is made from natural resources and it is people who are performing the tasks to make the systems appear autonomous.

Making something from natural resources does not make it natural. If that were the case, we wouldn't have the word "artificial", since everything we make comes from natural elements and everything would be "natural". The fact that you took natural resources and built something else from it--that it didn't exist in nature already--makes it artificial. AI is definitely artificial.

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I’m not arguing with your point, but let me offer another thought. The crux of this problem as I see it is that people consider themselves as separate from nature. The truth is that we are part of nature and the things we make are still part of nature. The opposite of “natural” is not “artificial” or “man-made” - it’s “supernatural”!

Of course the word “artificial” is useful to classify things for our safety and benefit, but we are not supernatural and so the things we create still exist in nature - like we are the hand of the universe reconfiguring itself.

This artificial separation of the human from nature has been popular in the past and I hope we overcome it.

I think a better term to use would be perhaps synthetic, which is something man made used to imitate something natural.

So we would call it synthetic intelligence, if we wanted to get pedantic.

Kai-Fu Lee and David Siegel talked about AI in April 2019 and mentioned:

> It's neither artificial nor intelligent

Quote is at 3:40 (topic starts around 3:05) in the YouTube video linked at the end of the article:

https://www.twosigma.com/articles/ai-past-and-future-a-conve...

Nice catch! How do you even

I had the exact same reaction, but I wonder if I'm too close to it to appreciate what the term might conjure up in the broader (voting) public that isn't in the industry. (FWIW I kind of like the term synthetic intelligence as an alternative.)

I do agree wholeheartedly that, much as in the case of cryptocurrency, there isn't an intuitive link between the product and the resources it requires to create and operate. The fact that GPT-3 would cost millions to reproduce in the commercial market doesn't even compute for me.

Yeah, she seems to be undercutting her argument for the sake of a pithy sounding statement. Her point seems to be not that AI isn't manmade, but rather that it isn't particularly autonomous, given that it is built using data that is collected and labeled through enormous amounts of human labor. Obviously that doesn't have any relation to what is meant by "artificial", though.

I think a better term to describe it is synthetic, which is something man made. Synthetic intelligence kinda has a nice ring to it as well.

But I agree with you, if we had it their way we would have "artificial sweeteners" but "natural sweeteners".

That's a nice clean breakdown of that wording issue. I get her point though I guess, but I was hoping there might be something deeper.

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