Inspired by a recent talk from Richard Stallman.
From Slashdot:
Speaking about AI, Stallman warned that “nowadays, people often use the term artificial intelligence for things that aren’t intelligent at all…” He makes a point of calling large language models “generators” because “They generate text and they don’t understand really what that text means.” (And they also make mistakes “without batting a virtual eyelash. So you can’t trust anything that they generate.”) Stallman says “Every time you call them AI, you are endorsing the claim that they are intelligent and they’re not. So let’s let’s refuse to do that.”
Sometimes I think that even though we are in a “FuckAI” community, we’re still helping the “AI” companies by tacitly agreeing that their LLMs and image generators are in fact “AI” when they’re not. It’s similar to how the people saying “AI will destroy humanity” give an outsized aura to LLMs that they don’t deserve.
Personally I like the term “generators” and will make an effort to use it, but I’m curious to hear everyone else’s thoughts.
Just like “atom” means “that you cannot cut”, but turns out you can actually split them into protons, neutrons and electrons. We just called them that way and although the meaning of the name doesn’t match reality, we stick to the term.
Yeah but reasonable people will readily agree that atoms are not “atomic” in the sense of being indivisible.
On the other hand grifters are really out here saying that computers are “intelligent”.
It’s also worth pointing out that people really did think atoms were indivisible but they updated their model based on new evidence. Meanwhile grifters never had any basis for their claims of “intelligence” and they will never change their grift despite overwhelming evidence.
But in your example the scientists didn’t stick to the term “atoms”. New terms were created (“Protons”, “Neutrons” etc) to describe the new thing.
They didn’t abandon the term “atom”, they kept it’s definition and created new words for things that didn’t meet that definition.
A proton, neutron, and orbiting electron is still referred to as a hydrogen atom. The term “atom” was never abandoned.