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Comment by SoftAnnaLee | Hacker News Reader

While I don't disagree with the basic premise ("AI" as a specific falsifiable term is hard to pin down due to the ubiquity associated with the term); I do think there are specific cut-and-dry circumstances where the FTC could falsifiably prove your product does not include AI.

For example, using an alternative of Amazon's Mechanical Turk to process data is clearly a case where your product does not use AI. Which I believe is more likely the kind of scenario envisioned when the author was writing that sentence.

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On the other end of the spectrum, calling a feature of a product "AI" seems to imply some minimal level of complexity.

If, for example, a company marketed a toaster that "uses AI to toast your bread perfectly", I would expect that language to indicate something more sophisticated than an ordinary mechanical thermostat.

I would expect it to never burn that toast.

That would require the AI to perform at a superhuman level.

that would require the 'AI' to do something that computers are really good at - detect when a particular event (perfectly toasted) has been achieved via inputs monitored at the millisecond without deviation and then change a state - toasting to not toasting - based on detecting that event.

A toaster may not burn a piece of toast or, through inaction, allow a piece of toast to be burned.

A toaster must obey the doneness setting given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

A toaster must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

It makes sense to protect investors from falsely investing in new "AI" tech that isn't really new AI tech, but why do consumers need to be protected? If a software product solves their problem equally well with deep learning or with a more basic form of computation, why is the consumer harmed from false claims of AI?

To put it another way, if you found out that Chat GPT was implemented without any machine learning, and was just an elaborate creation of traditional software, would the consumer of the product have been harmed by false claims of AI?

AI is not machine learning. And no, if someone could implement something similiar using gotos it would have the same value.

If you buy a painting advertised as a Monet, you are similarly not harmed if it wasn’t actually painted by Monet. But people like to know what they’re buying.

Less sarcastically, info about how a thing is made helps consumers reason about what it’s capable of. The whole reason marketers misuse the term is to mislead as to what it’s capable of.

Yeah - it needs to be clear to investors if the tech will scale as the business grows and if the tech has a good chance of improving if trained on a larger dataset or ML techniques improve generally.

Consumers should care about if a product is able to solve an AI-like problem that normally requires domain knowledge. Shouldn't care if done by ML, rules-based systems, or people. (Except perhaps may want assurance the product will continue to be able to support them as the customer scales.) Also should care about how the decision-making works.

Did you read the article?

One example given, was if the version “with AI” does not perform better than a previous version “without AI”.

So a precise definition of AI isn’t needed. Just that you cannot make misleading claims about your product behind the buzzword of AI.

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