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AI or AI, Which Is It?

Artificial Intelligence, a noun that has become a household term. Most refer to it as AI, which is less of a mouthful. Where and when did this term become real? [1] Apparently John McCarthy coined this phrase in 1956 at a conference.  Vannevar Bush and Alan Turing both mused about computers being intelligence and being able to enhance human intelligence or even simulate human-like thinking.

Is this thinking really "artificial" though? To suggest it being artificial would imply that there is a non-artificial type of intelligence. Otherwise, there is just intelligence, or thinking, or cognition. 

The famous Turing Test may be the source of this "artificial" notion. If there is an intelligent series of responses to a human interaction, and those responses are created using a computer program, then that is considered artificial. 

On a philosophical note, though, the programs are written by humans. Those programs, using rules given by humans, are creating responses that a human would create when the rules are triggered. A strict rule following human would, arguably, create the same stream of responses that a computer program would produce. Is that still "artificial?"

I suggest the narrative change. We are not making "artificial" intelligence tools, rather we are making Automated Intelligence tools. Whether it is ChatGPT or Gemini or CoPilot, the output is just an automated processing response to known inputs. 

When AlphaGo won a match of Go against a human it was not an artificial win. This was an automated win using rules and logic that optimized the response to the human's play style and followed some programming that was optimized for success.

Automated Intelligence, a term that makes AI more palatable because it doesn't anthropomorphize the notion of computer generated intelligence. 

[1] https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/csep590/06au/projects/history-ai.pdf 


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