First a point of clarification. The term AI has become overloaded recently which leads to a lot of confusion. AI as originally invisioned, and what most people imagine when you say AI would be more accurately called a general purpose AI. It’s something of human level intelligence (or greater) able to demonstrate self awareness and the ability to reason. Think HAL from 2001 a space odyssey. To date nobody has ever created a general purpose AI or even anything that comes remotely close to one.

What most people call AI these days would be more accurately referred to as machine learning or ML. Unlike an AI a ML algorithm is created for a specific task and can only do that specific task. ChatGPT is a ML designed to parse written text and output written text. There have similarly been several ML algorithms created recently that do a very good job of generating human sounding speech or images.

I am not angry at software engineers designing ML (or even ones trying to design AI). I am a software engineer. I have studied and even written some ML myself. What I am angry about is people who either have no idea what they’re talking about, or actually do but are trying to drum up page views making wildly unhinged articles either claiming “AI” will lead us to a utopia soon or is on the verge of starting the machine uprising to wipe out humanity. I am further angry at CEOs just pretty much in general and the post-capitalist hellhole western democracies are quickly turning into, but that’s a rant for another day.