We don't have a real AI, yet.

 

 

Okay, listen up folks. Let's get one thing straight: what we have today is not real AI. 

ChatGPT, Bard, etc. are just generative models that are trained on massive amounts of data in an attempt to compress it down into a trained model which it can run to try and regenerate answers based on the data it was trained from. The problem is, the model doesn't actually have any core understanding of the material it ingests--it's like a baby that can infer what things should look like and make things up along the way to fill in the blanks. Researchers call this "hallucinating." So, when you ask a chatbot like ChatGPT a question, it may confidently give you incorrect information.

But that's not the only problem. The data it's trained on is only as good as the people who wrote the code it's ingesting. And because training the model requires billions and billions of code snippets to train on and learn as data points, the only way we can conceivably feed it that volume of code is to download it en-masse from the internet. And none of that code is reviewed and checked for bugs or security flaws before the model is fed it. Garbage in, garbage out, folks.

And don't even get me started on how infuriating it is that we've taken to calling this "AI." It's a stupid techbro marketing stunt that has stuck, and now we all have to call it AI. But only those of us with the right tech background to know better will understand just how misleading that label is. As a result, tech companies can "build" models based on bad code to get funding from VCs that get attracted to this siren call. 

So, imagine an internet full of chatbots all set up by techbros and lazy hacks trying to cash in on the sudden easy ability to generate 'content' that can get past regular spam filters. They're pulling this stuff down from the internet en masse to train their buggy models, then submitting it back to places that are indexed online where the next set of buggy models can ingest it. It's an infinite beautiful river full of shit, folks. And because the models learn based on statistical trends and averages over a large set of data, this huge flood of new "AI" generated data is now the norm, and as such it takes precedence over human-generated data.

That's what's happening now, and it's happening because everyone wants to make bank. It doesn't matter if they understand, or care to understand, how this thing works, as long as it can make enough money for a new home is Aspen they will continue to promote this as a "revolutionary tech".

So, folks, be careful out there. Don't believe everything you read. And for the love of all that is good and holy, stop calling this garbage "AI."