my elderly mother is one of those people who still trusts large corporate news organizations, and she sent me a link to a CBS piece on the subject of "AI" because I've tried to explain to her before that it's all just hype, etc. and I got annoyed enough at the piece that I wrote a fairly detailed response, which I might as well share here as well, in case anyone finds the arguments useful
This video is basically fearmongering about China, portraying them as scary and unethical in their technological development practices, and arguing that we will need to be just as unethical as them or undefined bad things will happen. And the technology it's talking about (in military systems etc) is entirely different than the tech that Microsoft and Google and ChatGPT and all them are using to look good to shareholders, and it doesn't talk about that distinction in the slightest. It's all just "AI" in this piece and it doesn't explain the differences between expert systems (what the military has been working on since the 70s and which I helped people develop at [redacted]) and generative language models (which is what the current craze is and which are essentially toys).
Who does a piece like this benefit? It benefits the developers of the expert systems who contract for for the Department of Defense, because it suggests that they need to operate without restrictions, and more importantly it benefits Google/Microsoft/etc because it conflates their tech (which is basically just fancy chatbots) with what the DoD is doing. By presenting China as being capable of moving past us on ill-defined AI technology, this piece acts as domestic military propaganda and at the same time it presents that ill-defined AI technology as being on par with the atomic bomb in terms of importance.
The state of AI has not changed significantly in the last six months, if anything the weaknesses of generative language models have become more obvious as Microsoft and others have blindly thrown it into their products, whether customers want it or not. And that's not good for companies who are banking on AI being their next big income stream, so we're going to see more pieces like this show up.
Also of note, Paramount (owners of CBS) are also part of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the group that the WGA and SAG-AFTRA have been striking against. Part of the reason for that strike is that the AMPTP executives are all thrilled by the idea of using generative AI to write scripts and replace actors with CGI. By presenting expert systems AI as the next Manhattan Project, and by deliberately not making a distinction between that technology and the generative AI that AMPTP fantasizes about, they can suggest that people who are against replacing scriptwriters with chatbots are a danger to national security.
(note: many, many years ago I was a network administrator for a while at a software company that developed expert systems for a variety of clients, including the DoD. I was not thrilled about this at the time and I'm not proud of it now)
