Is AI really intelligent?

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I think a thread on this topic will be interesting. My own position is that AI is intelligent, and that’s for a very simple reason: it can do things that require intelligence. That sounds circular, and in one sense it is. In another sense it isn’t. It’s a way of saying that we don’t have to examine the internal workings of a system to decide that it’s intelligent. Behavior alone is sufficient to make that determination. Intelligence is as intelligence does.

You might ask how I can judge intelligence in a system if I haven’t defined what intelligence actually is. My answer is that we already judge intelligence in humans and animals without a precise definition, so why should it be any different for machines? There are lots of concepts for which we don’t have precise definitions, yet we’re able to discuss them coherently. They’re the “I know it when I see it” concepts. I regard intelligence as one of those. The boundaries might be fuzzy, but we’re able to confidently say that some activities require intelligence (inventing the calculus) and others don’t (breathing).

I know that some readers will disagree with my functionalist view of intelligence, and that’s good. It should make for an interesting discussion.

355 thoughts on “Is AI really intelligent?”

  1. keiths: I picked it because I wanted to see how AI would interpret the map if I instructed it to zoom out and give a wider view of the surroundings. The results were amusing and interesting.

    Could you repeat that experiment with a male face in front of a map? I have a hunch that the flowery pattern behind former naval intelligence officer and foreign policy advisor Maggie Goodlander may be informed by the presence of some good ol’fashioned stereotypes in the training material.
    The slightly too perfect and cute students from earlier on disturb me as well.

    keiths: I have no idea what those things are supposed to be or how they derive from the training data. Any ideas?

    I think these are a mash between arms holding the straps of a backpack and some actual straps. The result is slightly Gigerian, if you ask me.

  2. Corneel:

    Could you repeat that experiment with a male face in front of a map? I have a hunch that the flowery pattern behind former naval intelligence officer and foreign policy advisor Maggie Goodlander may be informed by the presence of some good ol’fashioned stereotypes in the training material.

    Good idea. I’ll try to replace her with a male face without changing the background so that there’s only one variable. I need to learn how to do inpainting anyway.

    The slightly too perfect and cute students from earlier on disturb me as well.

    Yeah, most training datasets are heavily skewed toward attractive people. They’re drawn from “the wild”, and advertisements, celebrity photos, and stock photos are all are biased that way. I tried once to get Midjourney to generate images of unattractive people and the experiment was a failure. I’ll see if I can find those pics.

  4. I’m sitting here pondering the irony of classifying people as attractive or unattractive.

    I’m not implying it’s an invalid distinction.

  5. petrushka:

    I’m sitting here pondering the irony of classifying people as attractive or unattractive.

    The irony?

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