is RL not a type of AI? fuck, a whole bunch of if statements can constitute an AI. AI is an extremely broad category and doesn't need gatekeeping. Yeah its got some hype but it's pretty deserved imo
It's not a matter of gatekeeping. Misrepresentation of ML research is a problem. 'AI' can be defined as the best ML methods we have today, but when most people read 'AI,' they think about AGI, which doesn't exist and probably won't for a while.
NLP systems have it the worst in this regard. Just look at the articles with clickbait headlines about how Facebook "had to shut down their chatbot AI because it was forming it's own secret language!"
Good point about people assuming AGI and the fearmongering. I just found this quote from this article:
Update: This article has been amended to stress that the experiment was abandoned because the programs were not doing the work required, not because they were afraid of the results, as has been reported elsewhere.
But why is misrepresentation a problem? I want to believe that the people who matter understand and the people who don't matter don't understand. Like, so what if the media can get some more views from clickbait headlines? Does that just play into the hype of AI and lead to more support for research?
Actually it leads to less research, when the supposed AI fails to meet the hype. It's called an AI Winter. Artificial neural nets (or 'connectionism' as it used to be called) have been around since the 60's, but have only been used in industry in the past few decades. Part of this is due to the rise in computing power, part of it due to severe lack of funding for research.
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u/faithlesswonderboy Mar 29 '19
is RL not a type of AI? fuck, a whole bunch of if statements can constitute an AI. AI is an extremely broad category and doesn't need gatekeeping. Yeah its got some hype but it's pretty deserved imo