I’ve made the point a few times over the course of this project that we are really bad a defining AI. The point of reference from which we evaluate it is pretty stable from a perspective of resource consumption inputs, but from an output perspective that definition is often quite fuzzy.
What are we getting for all that energy, heat, water, and industrial pollution?
Are we talking about chatbots and using algorithms as surrogate friends, brainstorming companions, or digital therapists?
Is the term referring to generative slop engines, tokens turned into bland text and deceptive images and feed-filling reels?
Or, are we contemplating data processing by untiring neural nets, churning through problems composed of data sets impossibly too large to imagine?
Perhaps your only use of AI is as a tool to speed up the work that you were already going to do, as if AI were a calculator on steroids or an audio transcription genie?
The list goes on.
And I don’t have a clear answer to which even I personally mean on a given day.
But thinking more on the AI dichotomy encountered by my daughter in the world higher education I think there is an interesting starting point for evaluation that comes from the opposing messaging she found there. On one side, technical students were encouraged to explore the potential of AI while on the other side, arts students were threatened with academic censure for even suggesting they thought about engaging with an algorithm.
The axis here is one of “right” answers.
On one end of the chart there is certainty. Either human or AI when engaged with a problem will come up with a truth, mathematical or logical or scientific. The AI is a shortcut.
On the other end of the chart is fuzziness. The problem is one with a highly variable and creative output, and while the AI is still a shortcut, it is also a bypass of the meat brain for which the final output would be a measure of expression, skill, and ideas.
Both are forms of AI, both have social, environmental, and human impacts in their use, but makes the algorithm a tool while the other makes it a cheat.
