Kuyta: Hello to everyone again! In this post, we will discuss the magical thingamajig of AI. We will answer the questions: What is AI? How is it made? What are the forms of it? How does it work?
I will start with what is actually AI. The definition of AI varies with who you ask it to; however, one of the most commonly used definitions of it comes from one of John McCarthy’s papers: “It is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs. It is related to the similar task of using computers to understand human intelligence, but AI does not have to confine itself to methods that are biologically observable.”
However, decades before McCarthy’s paper, one of the GOATs of computing, Alan Turing, made a statement about AI: in one of his seminars, he asked the question “Can machines think?” From there, he came up with a test, now famously called “The Turing Test” (how original? (Really, your surname?) This test is made to distinguish between human and computer-generated art, text, or anything really.
The authors of one of the most used textbooks on AI, Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig’s Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, differentiated AI into computer systems on the basis of rationality and humans, and thinking vs. acting.
Computer Systems Based On A Human Approach:
- Systems that think like humans,
- systems that act like humans.
Computer Systems Based on an Ideal Approach:
- Systems that think rationally,
- systems that act rationally.
Most AIs that are commonly used in the world—ChatGPT, Dall E 2, GPT3, and MidJourney—are based on systems that act like humans. Like, for instance, ChatGPT tries to be a human by trying to talk like a human. It tries to have a human conversation with you. By contrast, systems that think like humans are basically trying to learn how humans would think based on a hypothetical situation. For example, a problem solver might not actually solve a problem correctly; however, it will have similar thought processes to real humans who tried to solve the same problem.
As a final word, we can say that AI are computational intelligences that do not have a mind of their own but are things that can mimic human thoughts and actions (I mean, they can mimic reeeally well these days).
With that said, I am going to give the microphone to Sir Potata to talk about AI’s decades-old history.
