Fuck AI

I think so as well. It comes with some kind of implication on how the result of the imitation game is supposed to mean something. But it doesn't. There's no good/scientific way to see how something is able to fool a human observer and then conclude that thing is something... Or has specific attributes... I mean other than it's able to fool a human in this specific experiment setup. There's just a huge gap in reasoning after the experiment. I think it's mostly what it is, a spin on a party game.

And yes. So far all we've seen is narrow AI. That's the term for an artificial thing which can do some specific tasks it's been trained for. You can never teach ChatGPT to drive a car properly. You'd have to design a new AI for that. And that one will probably not be able to load the dishwasher... In fact I've never seen any robot be able to do simple things like load a dishwasher. They regularly tip over while doing it or put in just 3 plates as a demo... While I as a human have a broader bandwidth of things I'm capable of. And I can transfer my knowledge to entirely new things and/or successfully learn about them. While current AI is very limited in doing that.

I think there might be some prospect of AI becoming more universal. Maybe one day we'll see general (/strong) AI. But as of today that's utter science fiction. Nobody has a clue how to make AI learn all by itself about new concepts, without feeding it in in the factory. They'll have to figure out how to make it learn while running, and not take it down and release a new ChatGPT every half a year. Adapt and change, remember things... That's all huge, unsolved engineering problems. I suspect to become properly useful for a lot of real-world tasks we gotta merge robotics and AI some more... But maybe that's not strictly necessary, depending on how we define the concept. But it's hard to come up with an experiment setup to test for all the things humans can possibly do. Or choose the correct subset of tasks to make the comparison mean something. But I'm fairly positive it's going to take a decade or more before we're anywhere close. If that's even possible. It's a bit difficult to judge since we don't know how to design strong AI on a human level, what compute power it'd need etc.

Till then, we're stuck with chatbots which can mimick text and learn some from ingesting it, maybe oneday self-driving cars, chessbots, smart thermostats... I mean these things can solve tasks. (Some better than others.) But what does that mean? Probably not a lot, if you're looking at a smart thermostat and how that's able to get the temperature just right, but you expect it to somehow turn into Commander Data from Star Trek.

thx! corrected.

Pay attention to your professors, then. I guess they're about to teach you what a Turing machine is. And what "AI" is, though from my experience, that term isn't thrown around in CS nearly as much. It's kind of a buzzword, and intelligence is ill-defined... Instead you'd get a lecture on machine learning, or deep learning or whatever. And you'll get a headache from all the maths and statistics required to do machine learning. It's not all that hard. But it can get involved. There's also a fascinating history to learn. "AI" didn't always mean ChatGPT.

It's all bulllshit. There is no "AI".

All digital computers are Turing machines.

a turing machine is a theoretical device that can perform any computation. a language model is a set of matrix multiplications that takes a list of words and gives back the statistically most likely next word.

your question is like asking if novels have become language.