Free Writing:
- With what I understand now regarding AI I realize that I really had no clue what AI actually was before entering the class.
- My understanding of AI prior to the course was that it scraped the internet 'learned' from what it had collected and then it produced a coherent response.
- Now I understand that what AI does is use a series of probabilities to come up with these responses. Large complicated algorithms produce the text and not some well educated machine.
- AI does not actually 'learn' nor is it really 'intelligent' in my understandings of those words. AI is more so a machine that uses tokens arranged into a series based of the probability these tokens follow one another within the corpus. Emily Bender's Thai library thought experiment is what really drove this point home for me.
- Another thing I was surprised to learn was that 'AI' had a much longer history than I thought. AI and concepts surrounded it have been intertwined with computer science since nearly the beginning of that discipline. Even Chatbots like Eliza have existed for decades.