AI is all over the place

... and we are not going to be able to change that, for sure. So in a monetized system like Hive the discussion about " is it good or bad" has started already a while ago, also between the ~~wise~~ wild bunch at the Silverbloggers. What do we curate or not ?!? Where do we draw the line and why ?!?

To me, this is reason enough to observe the phenomena AI a little closer - for me, for you, for everyone. Where does the word "artificial intelligence" come from, what does it really mean ?!? Is there really some intelligence in these systems or is it more just an "ASS" - Artificial Servant System ?!?

Here's what the dictionary says:

^{^Source}

Artificial

adjective

produced by man; not occurring naturally artificial materials of great strength
made in imitation of a natural product, esp as a substitute; not genuine artificial cream
pretended; assumed; insincere an artificial manner
lacking in spontaneity; affected an artificial laugh
made without regard to the particular needs of a situation, person, etc.; imposed arbitrarily; unnatural artificial rules for dormitory residents.

Intelligence

noun

the capacity for understanding; ability to perceive and comprehend meaning
good mental capacity a person of intelligence
old-fashioned. news; information
military information about enemies, spies, etc
a group or department that gathers or deals with such information
often capital an intelligent being, esp one that is not embodied
modifier of or relating to intelligence an intelligence network

Artificial Intelligence

noun

THE STUDY of the modelling of human mental functions by computer programs
The "ability" of a computer or other machine to perform actions thought to require intelligence. Among these actions are logical deduction and inference, creativity, the ability to make decisions based on past experience or insufficient or conflicting information, and the ability to understand spoken language.
The means of duplicating or imitating intelligence in computers , robots or other devices, which allows them to solve problems, discriminate among objects, and respond to voice commands.

This is what stays stuck after reading:

Something not naturally occurring. An imitation, not genuine - with lacking of spontaneity and made without caring for particular needs of a person or situation...

Is "artificial" connected to the word "art" ?

When i started this article, i had to ask me this question. It is just kinda obvious that these words are coming from the same source. It just wasn't clear to me how. So back to the internet to see what it can tell me about.

There it was where i found "Major Overload" on stackexchange with his explanation about the subject. And it suddenly made a lot of sense - an interesting read for sure. In short: The answer to the question is - Yes!

A short part of his comment:

The answer lies in the middle, in artifice. Artificial is the adjectival form and means something's fake, but artifice specifically refers to using intelligence, skill or a stratagem to outwit someone or trick them into believing something false. The connection to something fake is there but it's shifted to beliefs and connected now to the skill that generated the false belief.

Dictionary.com references an obsolete usage of artifice as "craftsmanship". Art is a specialised craft, often visual. So it's easy to see a connection now between art and artifice, a craft in appearances (deception in the sinister case), and artificial, as something that bears the hallmarks of an artifice.

Artificial also connotes man-made - something to replace the organic. This is something they all share: a painting is a man-made depiction (traditional paintings, landscapes or portraits, stand-in for the real experience) and an artifice is obviously a man-made strategy. This need not be negative, as the idea of "fake" implies, but one can see the relationship between "crafting" something, being fake and getting increasingly distant from the category of "organic". Artificial might be compared to the word superficial in being about surface/immediate perceptions but something superficial implies an emptiness where as something artificial just has a different composition (but some sense of loss of the "real" thing)......

You can find his complete message here > stackexchange - On a side note: It seams to me that our school years are some sort of an artifice we have to live through ?! :smirk:

So, what is this "Artificial Intelligence" really ?!?

What better but talk directly with one of these "intelligent" its, giving it/them the possibility to explain themselves on this subject. And wow, with all the scepticism i went into that chat, it still gave me some ideas on what humans may are working on to get to the point, that one day, they "can" talk to HAL 2000 and his family.

Second, it made me think about the ethic behind the idea of a "real" AI Machine, since it probably involves the creation of an "artificial human consciousness" and/or worse (?) to come. Frankensteins ancestors are still among us. #justSaying

If you want to read the chat i started with the "ASS"-bot ChatGTP, click this link. Please stay sceptic !

Some View Points out of the WWWB

_{World Wide Web Bubble}

"AI" versus "ML - Machine Learning"

Reading about "AI" we can come across the expression "machine learning". Now, isn't that the same?! Nope, there is a slight difference between "Artificial Intelligence" and "ML - Machine Learning" it seems. The research to make computers "intelligent" is called "AI", where the part to do so is called "ML - Machine Learning". ^{A little bit more of that is explained in a ~~Weird~~ Wired article. :)}

A New Age of Slavery !?!

It's not yet that these "ASS"-machines are able to really do the work they supposed to do. Though that's what the big masses are believing, since Medias and Governments are talking just about that lately...

After watching "The Modern Day Slaves of the AI Tech World", which gives a small insight to another unbelievable side of this "ASS" coin, it seems to me that ML is only working with a lot of humans involved and mostly not for the good.. Hopefully the video will be playable for you, since in some countries this video is prohibited! Hm, what a bizarre coincidence!

Now this documentary did two things to me... it surprised and it didn't. Since we all ~~getting~~ are more and more forced to be involved with teaching a dumb machine on how life of a human is or must be - for safety and protection -, it isn't to much of a surprise that the "Kings" of SillyCon-Valley ~~had to find~~ found a way to make humans do the job, while they are not paying anything, or close to nothing, so they at the same time get richer and richer. Again !

Just use a search engine like "goolag" and you can already see how it works... or even better - a translator. For example deepl - after you put your text in and the translation appears, you can choose to change words to make the sentence "more" accurate. At that point we are actually "working" for a company to teach the machine to become better. Voilà voilà, all that for free. Same with the pictures, just check on Sora and be impressed how many are actually keen to work for free for the fun of it. It's somehow disturbing!

The picture and video side of "ASS" shows another "danger" to come slowly but surely. The quality of these machine generated images and videos is getting so good, that in a few years we'll ~~probably~~ sure have a lot of difficulties to distinguish between the real and the fake. Though, most of our android members of the social community are already living in their fake world. It's all an illusion anyway. :smirk:

In the Line of Fire

If you really look closely to the small text on the bottom of the website of some of these "ASS" tools, we sometimes can read stuff like..:

Caution: Our AI Detector is advanced, but no detectors are 100% reliable, no matter what their accuracy scores claim.

ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info.

Yep, it is possible that these "intelligent" machines give you just crap info. That's the reason to always be sceptic and check whatever story it is giving you. You never know what these machines gonna say about you, if asked.

For example: In an Article on TechCrunch we can read that OpenAI is facing another privacy complaint in Europe for hallucinating false information. Where in an interaction with ChatGPT the ~~AI~~ "ASS" responds to a question asking “who is Arve Hjalmar Holmen?” — the name of the individual bringing the complaint — by producing a tragic fiction that falsely states he was convicted for child murder and sentenced to 21 years in prison for slaying two of his own sons.

Now that's a HUGE WTAF. No wonder that Arve Holmen went and wants to put that straight. And in the TechCrunch article we can read about quite a few stories of individuals with privacy complaints against ChatGPT.

All of this shows that we are also entering a new era of fraud, scams and slanderous accusations. Unbelievable ? Do you want some more? How about the story in which Fakers were exposed in tech dev recruitments ?

It definitely questions where all this is going and how to stop it. Some "ASS" machines even offer to rewrite generated text to make it more human like, hmm. Do we need laws ? Governments involvements ? Sure governments are already spending billions of €/$ on the subject "ASS", though when reading through their ~~papers~~ ideas, i'm not too sure that it's for the better for us neither. They are already working on a digital ID for everyone who wants to use the internet for a while now. All this "crap" suites them actually? The idiocracy is just asking for it soon enough.

Journalism and Medias in the Age of AI "ASS"

Now here is probably the best example for why we all have to be sceptic on what info is sold to us. Journalist all over the world are discussing on the how's. For the fact that there are legions of infos about that, here a distill of two i found interesting !

L'intelligence artificielle dans les médias : entre innovation et éthique

In a French interview with the Director of "France Télévision" it says:

Artificial intelligence, traditionally confined to repetitive and predictive tasks, has crossed a decisive threshold, evolving far beyond its initial functions. It is no longer seen as a simple assistant, but as a potential collaborator capable of making a significant contribution to the creative process...

Today's AI goes beyond simple data analysis. It is capable of generating complex articles and narratives. It points out to the surprising effectiveness of these systems in producing content that looks as if it has been written by humans, calling into question the boundary between human and artificial creation...

‘These models work on probability and sometimes have a tendency to invent facts that don't exist’. This challenge raises important questions about reliability and verification in journalism in the age of AI...

She warns about one major risk: the loss of journalistic rigour and objectivity. ‘There is a danger of thinking that there is this wonderful tool that can be easily used’, underlining the deceptive ease with which AI can be used by media professionals...

The issue of copyright is also at the heart of the debate on AI in the media. Traditional media, faced with the ‘plundering’ of their content by AI, have begun to block crawlers (software that stores scanned information) in order to protect their original works. This measure, adopted in France, illustrates the tension between the free use of AI and the protection of creative content...

^{^{Source - Text is translated with deepl}}

Journalism and Artificial Intelligence - Who Controls the Narrative

In an article by Mohammad Zeidan, he points out some interesting information and made me find “Big Tech Has Our Attention — Just Not Our Trust, ” in which critic Parmy Olson explains how the Big Boys in SillyCon-Valley could paint a dreamy, imaginary picture of what the future should look like thanks to artificial intelligence, making promises about “prosperity promised to humanity". In there Olson writes:

The relationship between artificial intelligence technologies and journalism in 2024 calls for a critical analysis. The ongoing attention and debate on this topic partly highlight the significant influence of major tech companies over media narratives. This dynamic often shifts the balance of power in favour of these corporations and the nations they represent.

Zeidan then goes on:

Generative AI platforms are tools that facilitate aspects of journalistic work and break with the negative relationship in search engines, where control over results and difficulty in accessing relevant information, but the same problem will appear in AI tools that are capable of reproducing biases purely for profit and/or political reasons...

Can we solely rely on technology companies that provide artificial intelligence services? In other words, can we rely on them and submit to their costs and terms of use? And can we believe that they develop their products in a way that serves the profession of journalism and its workers? ...

Journalists’ answers to this question revealed a genuine concern about the toxic relationship between journalism and technology companies, as the disparity continues to escalate between those who own the technology and the capabilities to develop it and those who are forced to limit themselves to harmful use of it.

For example, major media outlets such as the New York Times have enormous potential to invest in developing internal AI software that suits their needs and benefits from their vast journalistic archives and digital and technical infrastructure. They legally pursue any company that tries to seize their content to train generative models, as they recently did with OpenAI. Smaller institutions will remain subject to what technology companies provide, each according to its financial and technical solvency, which hinders their independence and limits their chances of survival in a new environment of technical competition, not to mention the exploitation of these technology companies of their content and archives and benefiting from them to enhance the power of their models. ^{^{Source Article}}

Please - I know I tend to repeat myself, but:

It is most important to always be consciously aware that all these "ASS" machines are programmed by a human and for that reason can most likely also be used to change any narrative to the view point of the ones financing it, especially in the medias !

Key Insights from the Top 100 AI Companies in the US by Total Funding

AI has rapidly evolved from a niche research field into a transformative force across industries, changing everything from healthcare and finance to entertainment and manufacturing. In the US, this revolution is being powered by startups and tech giants, all racing to build smarter, faster, and more capable AI systems.

Here are the most significant patterns and insights about the top AI companies in the US.