No AI in Schools

"AI" is a marketing term, not a scientific one

In the past, artificial intelligence was used in academia to describe human-like

However since 2023, it has been transformed into a marketing buzzword, and is now applied to anything; from TVs to vaccuum cleaners. Features that have existed for years are now re-labelled as "AI" in order to sell them. Companies are adding "AI" to their products because it improves the share price.

How it works

AI companies have a vested interest in making "AI" seem extremely complicated and mysterious. But modern AI is basically a very expensive, very fancy version of predictive text.

On your smartphone if you type "good m", predictive text guesses that you probably want to type "good morning". It's been trained on what words come after others, and it guesses based on what is most likely.

How "AI" is created

1. Get a huge amount of text

Take it from the newspapers (without their permission), books, forums.

The accuracy, quality and source of the text does not matter. The aim of the system is to produce natural-sounding text.

2. Find patterns in the text

Find which words are often said after others. This is called "training" and costs hundreds of millions of dollars and as much electricity as small countries use in a year.

3. Generate likely responses to an input

When given some text, the program will now output text that is the most _statistically likely_ way to respond to that given text.

"AI" is not intelligent

AI has no more intelligence than a magic eight-ball. It produces responses based on a series of complicated dice rolls.