[butUhmErm]

And we still are; computers are designed, software is designed.

“AI” as we know it does not exist without humans pushing it forward; romantic notions our inventions are independently sentient depends on ignoring a whole lot.

For the same reason I can choose to not import a religion I can not import the idea these stupid things are “thinking” independently of humans, without justifying it as I don’t have to with religion as well.

All the constraints are defined by us. It’s not magic.

[mod]

I agree it's not magic. I don't think art requires magic.

As a pretty handy example, photographers are considered artists. I took photography pretty seriously at one time, and it's very dear to me, but I will say that I don't think there's very much magic in it.

I don't think the algo is thinking or sentient or anything like that. It's hard to argue that it's not producing art, though.

Tangent: I would also argue humans are designed. I don't mean any mysticism: I think all life is being designed by unthinking processes. As evidence, just look at all the specialist life-forms that are filling a niche that they were...well, designed for.

[butUhmErm]

I am not saying it’s not producing art, I’m saying a human instigated the machine to produce it; it’s a robot with a bunch of brushes in its hand. The difference between that and life evolving to fill a gap in a vacuum is the computer did not do that on its own. Semantics, maybe, but a computer did not evolve until humans did. Fish and moss evolved independently of humans; that’s the difference that distinguishes whether AI is intelligent to me. I would define it as a memory store for contemporary human sensibilities, not a independently bodied entity.

That said, if people want to wax poetic privately in their own jargon, whatever, of course. That’s democracy.

But the refined over thousands of years corpus of knowledge “contained” within STEM fields has been shown over and over to be our most reliable guide humans have come up with for building a society. Nothing in there attempts to define what is and isn’t intelligence; it’s a model of what matter exists and how it coalesces at various “speeds” relative to light. Needing to define if AI is this or that is a romantic human thing; very subjective.

Where a physical thing “is” is hard to argue. Where a thing fits into ones subjective mental taxonomy is easy to argue.