Does AI exist?

Does AI exist?

What does artificial intelligence really mean? And does it even properly exist?

The more we play with ChatGPT the more I wonder how intelligent it really is. It creates the illusion of a thinking, sentient being responding to us as we interact with it. But I know that in actual fact it is a programme that simply predicts the most likely sequence of words that follows whatever words you put in, based on analysis of the vast amount of data it has gobbled up and digested.

It's definitely capable of coming up with plausible responses. Sometimes good ones, and sometimes batshit crazy ones. And it does feel plausibly intelligent. But no matter what we put into the system during one session, as soon as we start a new chat with it, everything that went before seems to have been forgotten. 

When thinking about artificial intelligence it’s probably good to keep in mind the difference between narrow AI and general AI.

Victor Tan explains the difference in an excellent article from The Stem Bulletin: “ChatGPT, as impressive as it is, belongs to a category of AI known as Narrow AI.

“These systems are designed to excel in specific tasks but lack the ability to understand, learn, and apply knowledge across a wide range of tasks and domains like humans do.”

Apparently some people argue that true AI, the kind that might be described as general AI, do not, and in fact can not ever exist. How much of that is human hubris I’m not sure. It’s certainly a scary idea that machines could develop a consciousness of their own.

One of my favourite films of all time is Ghost in the Shell, the original 1995 animated version, which imagines a future full of illegal ‘mind-hacking’ and machine enhanced humanity using cyborgs to foil criminal plots. I won’t spoil the story here in case you’ve not seen it yet (you should definitely see it), but the denouement, as well as being one of the coolest anime scenes ever, sets up a curious an unnerving premise about what a ‘general AI’ might look like and what it means for humans living alongside it.

Does AI truly exist? I’m not sure it does yet, but I wouldn’t rule it out forever.