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Comment by voidhorse | Hacker News Reader

Do we just call all of statistics "AI" now? I fail to see how or why applying basic machine learning techniques for data analysis is "artificial intelligence".

This idea that intellection is nothing more than pattern matching is silly and needs to die. Conceptual understanding entails more than just pattern matching.

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The AI part is the sentiment analysis of the chat message text and pictures. They're using statistics on the resulting aggregate data. This seems pretty reasonable to me. ML is roughly a gazillion times better than traditional NLP techniques for sentiment analysis. If you're doing sentiment analysis without ML in 2024 then you need to stop and reevaluate what you're doing.

If you simply wanted to complain that they're using "AI" to describe something that uses ML, please tell me so I can move along. Nothing interesting there to discuss.

Did you mean to write LLMs instead of ML? Aren't traditional NLP techniques a subfield of ML?

There's overlap, but many traditional NLP techniques are heuristics based. Here's an example: https://github.com/cjhutto/vaderSentiment

Historically ML is a sub field within the study of AI. So are a lot of even more mundane techniques. So, if the hit word to describe things is AI, and the shoe fits, wear it!

If you want to close your funding round.. yes

It's a mandatory buzzword for investment in 2024 since everything else has been milked to death already. I've seen companies go back and slap "AI" on things that have been out for 15 years.

Do you call all of LLMs “statistics”? I fail to see how anyone who has studied and worked with these systems could fail to see how they exhibit behavior of conceptual understanding.

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/435/

Sentiment analysis may ultimately just be "statistics" but IMHO it goes way beyond what most people consider statistics, which is collecting, organizing, graphing data. Sentiment analysis draws conclusions from the data, assigning things like "level of negativity" and "level of positivity" among other things. It definitely feels like an artificial type of thing that humans do, so artificial intelligence seems like a reasonable category to me.

AI is one of many headline buzzwords these days that get an outsized number of clicks relative to the content, right along with Tesla, Trump, Taylor Swift and probably a few others.

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