The AI Mirage: Just What Is "AI", Anyway?

I recently got and read a very interesting and insightful book, The AI Con by Drs. Emily Bender and Alex Hanna, contrasting the unrealistic, at times absurd hype that's inflating the AI bubble with the limitations and harms of real, existing AI. I'll be working many of its examples and points into future posts, but the book's introduction makes a distinction I found very helpful that I wanted to communicate before writing anything more substantive.

What does "AI" actually mean? Yes, it's short for "artificial intelligence", but this doesn't answer the question. Bender and Hanna argue that it isn't a single technology, but a marketing term for referring to a set of technologies to create the impression that they are approaching human levels of intelligence, creativity, judgment, or perception. They write:

the conversation becomes clearer if one speaks in terms of "automation" rather than "AI" and looks at precisely what is being automated. In doing so, we find several types of automation.

These include:

• Decision Making: Automating the making of decisions which may range from inconsequential (controlling robots, playing games) to life-changing (screening job, loan, or benefit applications, setting bail, operating vehicles).
• Classification: Classification of inputs into categories. This has many applications from targeted web advertising to image classification systems that can identify people in your photos...or identify your face from a database of driver's license photos.
• Recommendation: Selecting information to present to someone based on their usage history. Used extensively by social media platforms, online shopping, streaming platforms.
• Transcription/Translation:Automatically translating information from one format (e.g. images of text or audible speech) to another (like text), or translating written text from one language to another. There is some overlap between these technologies and classifiers.
• Media Generation: This is the type of "AI" that has become almost inescapable in the last few years: the kind that generates text, images, audio, or even full-blown movies from textual prompts. "Synthetic text extruding machines" (as Bender and Hanna memorably call them) have been wowing people with their ability to use language in a (superficially) human-like way; they are what's inflating the "AI" hype bubble, pulling the other automation technologies along behind them and enhancing their credibility by association.

The question of just what is being automated is the first of many critical questions Bender and Hanna encourage readers to ask in order to peer behind the "AI" curtain. In future posts, I'll try to be specific about which technology(s) I'm discussing. When specifically talking about the last technology listed above, I'll call it things like "genAI" or (following Bender and Hanna) "text extruder".