You were never into video games, right? The reason I ask, is because games use a lot of AI. One might see “AI” in the game settings, or if the game has some editing tool/level builder/ … one might see it there. If one takes an interest, one might pick up on people talking about the AI of one game or another.
I am always surprised, when I hear people say that LLMs are too simple to be real AI, because I’m thinking that most people who grew up in the last ~20 years would have interacted a lot with these much simpler game AIs. I would have thought that this knowledge would diffuse to parents and peers.
Non-rhetorical question: Any idea why that didn’t happen?
The purpose of game AI is to make games fun, not to advance serious research, but it certainly is real AI. Making computers play chess was a subject of much serious research. AI opponents in video games are not fundamentally different from that.
As humans, we have an unfortunate tendency to aggrandize our own group and denigrate others. I see anthropocentrism as just one aspect of that, beside nationalism, racism and such. This psychological goal could be equally well achieved by saying things like: “This is not real intelligence. It’s just artificial, like game AI.”
But I don’t see that take being made. I only see pseudo-smart assertions about how AI is just a marketing term.
I think anthropocentrism may have something to do with why the idea of “emergent abilities” (as step-changes in performance/parameters) is alluring. We like to believe that we are categorically different from animals; or at least, that is the traditional belief in many western cultures. We now know, though, that the brain does the thinking, and that human and other mammal brains only show differences in degree, not in kind. If you believe in some categorical difference between animals and humans, you would expect to find step-changes of that sort. Personally, I would find it nice, if I could believe that, somewhere along that continuum between animal and human brain, something goes click and makes it ok to eat them.