Member-only story
The Good A.I. We’re Not Talking About
The past year’s headlines on Artificial Intelligence (AI) have mostly focused on one particular subset of AI, Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI such as ChatGPT, Claude or Midjourney. For most of the general public that’s all AI is. Modern AI has been around for over 50 years. Algorithms, a core part of AI however, have been around for thousands of years.
As I’ve written before, AI is an umbrella term, a marketing catch-all that most scientists in the field of AI dislike. The hype around Generative AI (GAI), may even end up hurting the many advances and excellent, proven uses of AI across other industries.
Over the past year and a bit, as GAI slammed into society likes a bull in a china shop, it may seem as if we’re either on the path to techtopia or everything everywhere will end all at once. Neither is the case. Other AI tools have been around longer and proven themselves to be quite useful to humanity and are getting better.
It’s worth understanding and being aware of these other forms of AI puttering about in our sociocultural systems because, arguably, they are actually having and have had, more significant impact than we realize. Both good and bad, but then that’s the nature of how humans use technologies.
