AI Snake Oil
Nick recommended I read this book, so here it is. The book starts by providing an analogy for how we talk about AI -- imagine that all transport vehicles were grouped by one generic term instead of a variety like "car", "bus'', "rocket", and "boat". Imagine the confusion a conversation would experience if I was talking about boats and you were talking about rockets. This is one of the issues right now with discussions of "AI" -- there are several kinds of AI, but the commentary is all grouped together and conflating the various types. I think this is probably a specific example of what Ben Goldacre talks about in Bad Science -- science reporting by non-scientists is often overly credulous, and misses the subtleties. Next we need to decide what is in fact AI versus being something else which might be like AI, but not really AI. The book poses three questions to help here: Would a human performing this role require training? If so this might be AI. Image generation is a good example where. Is the behaviour of the system specified directly in code, or is it learnt from examples or a database search? The later is…