Earlier quoted context omitted.
What makes them stupid?
It's stupid because there's no formal definition of what counts as AI, so we repeat the same conversation every time. Hence the joke ML is just AI that works. There's a book from 1995, called Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, by by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, which gives the definition "AI is the study of agents that receive percepts from the environment and perform actions." but doesn't define intelli…
> If we go with that, though, I'd say AI is anything that uses a model to make decisions instead of hand written "if" statements.
Hand-written if-statements are a model though...
I would say AI is anything with the intention of performing as a human does. In my opinion, LLMs are AI because they're designed to either perform a human role, or be addressable like a human to a user. (In general I do not agree with implying intelligence by humanity or that it is exclusive to humanity, but it is genuinely the easiest way for me to explain this here.)
Even LLMs that are used as part of harnesses or backend services would count for this, because you could technically replace the model with an equivalent human and they would be able to read and write in its place.
And pre-LLM AI would also count for this, because the whole selling point of AI is that it's like a human in some way or could perform as a human does in some way. Even if it's purely for entertainment value or whatever, if the entertainment value includes that it seems like a human.
But uses of ML that have nothing to do with this would not count, like for example camera image enhancement. You could say a human could sit there and work through some algorithm manually (like from a book, etc) but that's not what image enhancement algorithms are doing. Now if you let an LLM have access to human-UX-ful photo editing tools and let it iterate or etc. then that would be AI but that's another thing.
It's difficult to define precisely exactly what this definition is though. Different people have different ideas of what "performing as a human does" means. If the ML algorithm is executing machine code instructions to perform a task then could a human execute the same machine code instructions by hand to prove that it's AI? No, because the human has to be in place of it, not emulating it. The human would have to take its inputs and give its outputs, without depending on its definition. So, then, it depends on where you define the boundaries of the system. LLMs typically output in tokens, so would a human have to think in tokens? No, because the use of tokens is as a text encoding, and humans are perfectly free to use tools in their work, etc. A human being able to read and write text in English would still prove that a language model that reads and writes the same but in tokens is AI as long as they would be more or less interchangeable.
Of course, today's LLMs are not really true replacements for humans but I'm not talking about performance here, just where they can be positioned. AI to me is more of an intention than a technology -- any technology can be AI depending on how you use it. ML however is a technology, no matter the intention.