Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen on Nostr: Russell and Norvig was our textbook and I remember writing a little simulation of an ...

Russell and Norvig was our textbook and I remember writing a little simulation of an autonomous agent (wow! "agentic #AI"!!1!) with a limited percept (I haven't used THAT word in a long while) that explored a 2D space and tried to build up an internal map of it.

That old fondness for #artificial_intelligence and certain ideas I've had from both high school and college years that I've thought of exploring, little projects in AI, have *never gone away*. I'm not, strictly speaking, an AI hater. I have great fondness for AI characters in fiction and I myself take it as an article of personal faith that synthetic sentience and even the ability to feel emotions are practical goals. If one kind of physical matrix can harbor these things than another can—to me that's practically self-evident but I admit that I'd have a tough time working out a rational defence of this assertion.

Hence #GenAI disgusts me chiefly because it's a *travesty* on artificial intelligence. It's a marketing mockery, a fraudulent miracle designed to exploit the kind of warm feelings that I had about robots and AI back in high school. There's people who've been cherishing daydreams about AI and robot friends all their lives I'm sure, decade after decade. So along come the "generative AI" people, pretending as if all those decades of daydreams have finally become reality. **And they haven't.**

(cont'd)