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Comment by lacker | Hacker News Reader

I think most people who want to "opt out of AI" don't actually understand where AI is used. Every Google search uses AI, even the ones that don't show an "AI panel" at the top. Every iOS spellcheck uses AI. Every time you send an email or make a non-cryptocurrency electronic payment, you're relying on an AI that verifies that your transaction is legitimate.

I imagine the author would respond, "That's not what I mean!" Well, they should figure out what they actually mean.

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Somewhere in 2024 I noticed that "AI" shifted to no longer include "machine learning" and is now closer to "GenAI" but still bigger than that. It was never a strict definition, and was always shifting, but it made a big shift last year to no longer include classical ML. Even fairly technical people recognize the shift.

It swings both ways. In some circles, logistic regression is AI, in others, only AGI is AI.

The colloquial definitions have always been more cultural than technical, but it's become more acute recently.

> I think we should shed the idea that AI is a technological artifact with political features and recognize it as a political artifact through and through. AI is an ideological project to shift authority and autonomy away from individuals, towards centralized structures of power. https://ali-alkhatib.com/blog/defining-ai

I’ve worked in this field for 20+ years and as far as I can tell the only consistent colloquial definition of AI is “things lay people are surprised a computer can do right now”

AI has always been a marketing term for computer science research -- right from the inception. It's a sin of academia, not the public.

As if anyone in the public cared about marketing for CS research. Hardly anyone is even exposed to it.

AI in the public mind comes from science fiction, and it means the same thing it meant for the past 5+ decades: a machine that presents recognizable characteristics of a thinking person - some story-specific combination of being as smart (or much smarter) than people in a broad (if limited) set of domains and activities, and having the ability (or at least giving impression of it) to autonomously set goals based on its own value system.

That is the "AI" general population experiences - a sci-fi trope, not tech industry marketing.

The scifi AI boom in the 60s follows the AI research boom. This was the original academia hype cycle and one which still scars the public mind via this scifi.

I imagine the author would respond: "That's what I said"

"Opting out of AI is no simple matter.

AI powers essential systems such as healthcare, transport and finance.

It also influences hiring decisions, rental applications, loans, credit scoring, social media feeds, government services and even what news or information we see when we search online."

tech people often refer to politicians as somehow dumb, but big AI safety legislation two years ago on both sides of the North Atlantic, deeply dives into exactly this as "safety" for the general public.

Okay, then I guess they’ll agree to paying more for those services since they’ll cost more to deal with someone’s boutique Amistics.

If I was given the choice, I would without exception pay more for non-AI service.

Some businesses have done similar. Some banks in Australia announced they will be charging a fee for withdrawing cash at the counter rather than at ATMs, other businesses charge fees for receiving communications by letter rather than email.

As long as there's a choice it allows the market to influence decisions.

The big issue is forcing AI down everyone's throat without being the least concerned about their experience.

It's not even about paying more. Think of email. Every time you send an email, there's an AI that scans it for spam.

How could there be a system that lets you opt out, but keep sending email? Obviously all the spammers would love to opt out of spam filtering, if they could.

The system just fundamentally does not work without AI. To opt out of AI, you will have to stop sending email. And using credit cards. And doing Google searches. Etc etc etc...

I'm just not sure I see where AI has made my search results better or more reliable. And until it can be proven that those results are better, I'm going to remain skeptical.

I'm not even sure what form that proof would take. I do know that I can tolerate non-deterministic behavior from a human, but having computers demonstrate non-deterministic behavior is, to me, a violation of the purpose for which we build computers.

"I'm just not sure I see where AI has made my search results better or more reliable."

Did you prefer Google search results ten years ago? Those were still using all manner of machine learning algorithms, which is what we used to call "AI".

Even 20 years ago, it wasn't using AI for the core algorithm, but for plenty of subsystems, like (IIRC) spellchecking, language classification, and spam detection.

Came here to say exactly that. The use of "AI" as a weird, all-encompassing boogeyman is a big part of the problem here - it's quickly growing to mean "any form of technology that I don't like or don't understand" for a growing number of people.

The author of this piece made no attempt at all to define what "AI" they were talking about here, which I think was irresponsible of them.

Yes, yet another example why the word 'AI' should be tabooed : use 'machine', 'software', "software using neural networks" (or another specific term) instead.

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