Wow, the emotional reactions are really something to take in. You don't really notice your youth going, it happens so slowly. It's almost like seeing a long lost friend. I can totally empathize with the reactions here.
AI is really something else.
AI is really something else.
- recognizes a face
- removes a few common wrinkles, e.g. nasolabial folds (-- these in particular are the most common marker of an "aged" face, and people who don't have them or who have broad nasiolabial folds are often said to "age gracefully")
- smooths out and brightens the rest.
It's not creating or generating anything, really. Just running a very adroit filter in real time. To what extent is it, then, AI? We should be wary of the way buzzwords are inserted everywhere, I think. (Remember when it was all "nano"?)
Nice
- You mean advanced image processing?
- blank stare. uh... ok, whatever, it's really cool
- It is advanced image processing, not "AI"
- yea, so anyway, check this out
X is hard, only people can do it. X requires intelligence. A computer doing X is AI.
AI researcher programs a computer to do X
Oh, X isn't AI, it's just [describe what AI researcher did]. That's not real AI.
> Researcher Rodney Brooks complains: "Every time we figure out a piece of it, it stops being magical; we say, 'Oh, that's just a computation.'"
Instead, for-profit companies seem to have let their marketing departments move the goal-posts to the 40-yard line. "We can't build real machine intelligence, so we'll call this AI."
For me, I always thought R2D2 or R. Daneel Olivaw were what AI was supposed to be. Not "playing Go is hard, so a computer program that can do that is AI." It's the AI label that has been misapplied.
I know, this is where I get the lecture about words meaning different things over time. It's why the technical term for the stuff we've been talking about is Machine Learning systems, not "AI." The "AI" phrase is marketing fluff.
For any reasonable definition of understanding, we have. If you wanted to test my understanding of an article after reading it, what would you ask me? Now submit the same articles to ChatGPT and ask the same questions. I'm not sure who would score better.
The ability to generate text from statistical models of text is not understanding. That we can fool vision systems with decals is because those vision systems cannot bring a model of the world to bear on the interpretation of the statistical matches coming in through the detectors.
We've built Chinese rooms able to supply gibberish and excellent translation with equal aplomb.
Ask a cocky undergraduate philosophy student to BS you about how 2 + 2 = 5, and they will confidently do the same.
What’s your point?
"AI" is going to stick as a broad term, get used to it.
No, nothing is “really AI” except AGI, everything else is only called AI when its new and shiny. Once its established, it stops being AI.
E.g., rule-based expert systems are no longer described as AI by almost anyone, despite being one of the earliest kinds of “AI” systems. In a few years, LLMs and diffusion-based text-to-image and image-to-image systems won’t be “AI” either.
Unless you're unlucky and start losing your hair in your 20s. That really teaches you a lot of life lessons about self-image, aging, the way beauty is marketed and about confidence in general.
I think accepting hair loss and aging made me a better person. These AI youth filters actually annoy me because they are so blatantly manipulative and prey on insecurities often instilled/reinforced by advertising and social media in the first place.
I suppose you aren't a frequent user of Tiktok, which is a good thing. I think I'll also be addressing the general HN reader with this comment.
Exaggerated and performed responses are a staple of content on the Tiktok platform, which isn't to say that the filter itself isn't something you can use to reflect on. But give it a browse, and browse enough and you'll see that the content there is mostly acted out and inauthentic, and you'll get a better sense of just how manufactured it is. Savvy teens, children and young adults who frequent the platform know how inauthentic it is. Which is not to say that it isn't entertaining; like how wrestling and drama serials are fictional yet entertaining.
Yes, it is. AI is really something else. Not this, which isn't AI at all.