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Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying
(www.thenerve.news)
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
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To the average person (and this includes politicians, basically anyone not a software engineer developing the tools )who Cory generally writes to try and inform, they are the same.
Should they be? No. But that's a whole different thing and trying to change that in the general public mind doesn't change his current point about AI as the public thinks of it right now.
Speaking at the level of your target audience is wise, but there is a point where information is not just simplfied, but lost, and I think equating chat bots with AI in the broader sense is past that point. It would be like equating websites with the internet.
I think the comparison is acceptable with maybe a terminology clarification in the footnotes, because "AI" is the false term under which this current bullshit is being marketed.
And people who believe the core mechanism in large language models to be AI are so uneducated that they will probably neither understand the distinction to legitimate AI research, nor bother to read footnotes.
What does that mean? Transformers aren't AI? What? I don't think you understand this as much as you think you do.
Think all you want, statistical text prediction has nothing to do with AI. The "intelligent" algorithms are all in the pre- and postprocessing steps that make the output sound good enough to fool gullible people into assumong intelligence.